MICHAEL RADO
2019 - 2021
Michael Rado was born in Central Ohio, and currently lives and works in New York. Spanning sculpture, performance, video, and drawing, his work explores themes of idealism, culture, and order in both domestic and public space. He received his B.F.A. in 2009 from the University of Michigan and his M.F.A. in 2016 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, Rado was a Fields Fellow at the University of Chicago. His work has been exhibited throughout the midwest, notably at EXPO Chicago, Kruger Gallery, with Fieldwork Collaborative, and The Franklin.
WORK
“I am starting to think about the concept of Dynamic Symmetry.”
STUDIO
MICHAEL RADO IN CONVERSATION WITH MARINA GLUCKMAN
MG: Let’s start with these larger works and talk about the dimensions of each form. It feels like there’s some continuous aspect of that, which also correlates to the smaller works.
MR: They were really intended for me to break out of patterns of my work. Generally, I don’t use color actively. I certainly don’t make decisions around color. That combined with also my tendency to be systematic or approach work methodically as if I’m solving a problem. Trying to think about the more expressive quality or capacity of myself.
MG: Right, I do remember that you consider yourself a sculptor.
MR: My work spans sculpture, performance, video, drawing, but there is certainly always a sculptural element. I think about my recent works in a sculptural way, too, in terms of building. Alongside them I was starting to think about this concept of Dynamic Symmetry, which is really just this idea around proportions and ideal proportions. These would be examples: this latex plane is drawn on the diagonal of the sheet. When I was starting to think about this I realized the Arches sheets are actually root-2 rectangles, which means the short side is equal to one and the long side is equal to the square root of two, so they are in direct proportion to each other. The latex plane sits on this diagonal of the sheet, which means that it’s the same proportion as the sheet.
MG: How does this geometry correlate with the painterly composition?
MR: It does not. I’ve been thinking a little bit about idealism in construction of images historically, sometimes superimposed or sometimes intentionally drawn or painted to some proportion. I think I’m trying to find a balance between pure painterly composition and thinking about color in relation to form, and maybe it's a disconnection between the ideal proportions.
MG: Where are the collaged elements gathered from?
MR: They are from a mass collection of 50s, 60s, and 70s National Geographic’s. I think of them in the same frame of reference of idealism and the picturesque, and maybe a bit about systems of understanding. I think of geometry, measuring the earth, painting, ways of knowing, and our interaction with media. They are folded, the white part comes from the ink scratching off.
MG: Is the process intuitive?
MR: There is no measurement. It just comes from finding a square and then finding the diagonal that’s the inverse of the diagonal of the square to get to the root-2 rectangle again. I suppose my resistance to “math art” is that it lacks the expressive quality. This sort of relates to earlier works as well –– I was in Japan for a month or so taking these photographs with a proportion similar to this which was intended to be the golden ratio. Japanese architecture, painting and drawing generally don’t incorporate ideal geometry the way Western works do, so I was sort of projecting this geometry onto Japanese architecture, and rocks that had been chosen, gravestone markers, and buildings, and homes, and trees.
MG: One question I have is what are the deconstructed elements of the abstracted ground? Is it looking at colors to find different harmonies or you tell me?
MR: I think it depends. I think in these early works I was thinking of this plane sitting on top of this atmospheric ground, and wanted this direct projection from that space.
MG: That’s definitely achieved.
MR: Now, the smaller works are doing something different. This is very much a building process. I was thinking about Amy Sillman lecture about drawers versus painters, drawers being more like builders, which is very much how I operate. Every mark is a negation of a previous mark in some capacity.
MR: I consider these a starting point for a few bodies of work. It goes back to trying to solve a problem.
MG: A problem of finding harmony within these different elements or what do you consider the problem?
MR: I think the problem is more closely related to me, probably closer to self-understanding. I think it’s a problem that doesn’t necessarily exist. It’s certainly both an embrace and a rejection of various aspects—both my history, my relationship to the history of art, to dialectics around right and wrong.
MR: I think that’s the key, and it’s probably not coming out as much, but that’s really the goal. There is still a lot to explore.
MG: So you kind of come full circle here with works demonstrating different stages of your process. Are the drawings studies for the geometry of the folds?
MR: They were studies for the construction of this geometry. Actually everything in this room right now is the same proportion. The proportion from the short side to the long side is across all works.
