Latest arrivals in Adult Coloring Books Publisher: PictureBox (October 15, 2005) 11 x 8.5 x 0.6 inches Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds #2,993,963 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Pop Culture > Art in Books > Arts & Photography > Graphic Design > Techniques in Books > Arts & Photography > Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions An art and comics enthusiast Paper Rad: Cartoon Workshop Pig Tales Digest Ben Jones: New Painting & Drawing See and discover other items: design bookTo see zoomable versions of the images in this post, please click on them.The East Coast art collective Paper Rad existed for less than a decade, from very roughly 2001 to 2008, but in that short amount of time it created a massive body of work that spanned traditions and disciplines. For this year’s New York Art Book Fair, which opens Thursday night at MoMA PS1, Paul Bright and Sonja Radovancevic will debut “PPP: The Zines of Paper Rad,” a 200-page book that focuses on the publishing side of the multidisciplinary group, bringing together a trove of material from the collective’s prolific zine output.

(PPP stands for “Paul’s Pile of Papers” and is the debut offering from Bright and Radovancevic’s new imprint Delema. It includes an introduction from Bright and a forward from the artist Andrew Jeffrey Wright. Included throughout this piece is is an exclusive look into the book.)Bright—who owns the art, antique, and home store Bright Lyons in Downtown Brooklyn—has been an avid collector of all things Paper Rad (and related, like the work of the Providence collective Fort Thunder) for years now, but started seriously thinking about making a book when he received what he called a “mysterious text message” from Paper Rad member Ben Jones, notifying Bright that his mother was moving, leaving the fate of his zine archive unclear. “Basically, it was like a rescue mission,” Bright told me from the studio he shares with the painter Nicole Eisenman just a block away from his store.Paper Rad was perhaps best known for their ecstatic color palate and decidedly spiritual appropriation of 1980s and ’90s youth and pop culture, balanced out by original references and narratives native to the group.

Their varied output connected them to a number of disparate communities including the worlds of comics, underground music, video, and internet art. Paper Rad did New York gallery shows and played with noise bands in basements. Members of the group collaborated on videos with Beck, others made abstract DJ mixtapes. Their hyper-color website alone is an influential piece of net art. Although Bright and Radovancevic’s book focuses on the zines of the collective, you could just as easily do 200 pages on the group’s videos, installations, performances, or internet work.At its core, Paper Rad was a three-person collective (Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci, and Ben Jones), but their membership was always somewhat fluid, especially at the advent of the group, which grew out of a zine Jones made with the comics artist C.F. called Paper Radio (the fact that some Providence artists started a publication called Paper Rodeo just complicates things further). “There were zines here that, like, even with the input of Ben and Jacob and Jessica, we still weren’t sure whether it was Paper Rad,” Bright told me.

“There’s some really fucking, like, mysterious shit.” (People who could’ve been counted as Paper Rad at various points in time include members of the collective Dearraindrop, the composer David Wightman and Canadian artist Beau Labute.)Indoor Vegetable Garden LedAfter picking up “five big plastic bins of all Ben’s stuff” Bright said that between the newfound archive and his personal collection, “I felt confident that we had pretty much the entire spectrum of everything Paper Rad did.” Custom Bathroom Mirrors SeattleHe worked directly with members of the collective to attempt to date and title the works. Solar Lights For Porch PostsThen reps from Chelsea nonprofit bookstore Printed Matter (which founded the book fair), in Bright’s words, “really put a foot in our ass” to do something for this year’s edition.

“Printed Matter said we will give you the space at PS1 to show everything and it was just, like, How could you not do it?” “They didn’t say like, ‘You have to do this,’ but they pretty much said, ‘You guys have to be idiots not to do this.’ “From there, Bright’s involvement “really faded to the background,” and Radovancevic undertook the weighty project of documentation and design. The book includes varied work from the three core members in different configurations as well as sections for collaborations, poetry, post-Paper Rad work, and, of course, some wildcards. “We included these,” Bright said, pointing to two handmade books that looked like they were legitimately made by children. “These were created in the late ’80s. They look like they could be Paper Rad zines, everything about them is very Paper Rad-esque,” Bright said. “These were on the Paper Rad website as zines that were a part of their history.”Before he got into Paper Rad and related projects, Bright went to hardcore shows and collected Dadaist zines, when he could afford them.

Upon his discovery of Paper Rad, he saw a spirit similar to the Dadaists but one that synthesized with something more contemporary. “They had a merch table,” Bright recalled. An ex-hardcore kid (he was wearing a Black Flag shirt the day we spoke), he said that “the idea of a merch table or a distro table was something that was just part of my DNA already. So when I went to an art show and saw Paper Rad with their merch table it was just like, ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.'”“Contemporary art can suck,” Bright continued. “It can be a really unpleasant, negative world to be a part of sometimes, and Paper Rad was an incredible tonic to that.”ALL IMAGES: COURTESY DELEMA BOOKSSince 2001 Paperrad has worked non-stop on creating a massive catalogue of self-published comics and cd-rs, video cartoons, tv pilots, hand-painted t-shirts, and stuffed dolls. , celebrates the power of self-publishing over the internet, merging design and content into one free fantasy Mega-Mall for your spirit.

Included in this Spotlight are three works: “Gumby: Xmaz World View cartoon,” “ancient computing comic,” and “awards page.” At once affirmative and critical, the videos of artist collective Paper Rad synthesize popular material from television, video games, and advertising, reprogramming these references with an exuberantly neo-primitivist digital aesthetic. As member Jacob Ciocci writes, “In the ’70s and ’80s cartoons and consumer electronics were bigger and trashier than ever and freaked kids out… Now these kids are getting older and are freaking everybody else out by using this same throw-away trash.” The manic and varied output of Paper Rad–the art collective of Jessica Ciocci, her brother Jacob, and their friend Ben Jones–now includes a book, and it’s more than a hard copy of the group’s content-rich, arcade-like, bad html ‘web mall.’ The book, ‘B.J. and da Dogs,’ is published by art and comics press PictureBox, and is a collection of kaleidoscopic doodling, stoner poetry, two graphic novellas, found and staged photos, and installation documentation of large-scale painted cardboard dioramas.

Adult insights, near-past nostalgia, and obsessive pop culture tangents mesh with teen aesthetics (i.e. punk and skate zines of the ’80s & ’90s, early video games, neoprint booths and drawing software) amid multiple paper stocks and, as the team boasts, ‘almost every fluorescent Pantone ink.’ Here fancy production is the perfect foil to Paper Rad’s makeshift aesthetic and cavalier use of both obsolete and of-the-moment technologies. But remarkably, the collective’s pop treasure/ detritus sensibility, while astute, is only compassionately satirical, and hardly ironic at all. Mainly it’s really funny and looks great.     Paper Rad has performed and exhibited at Foxy Productions, Brooklyn, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the New York Underground Film Festival; the Boston Underground Film Festival; the Big Orbit Sound Lab, Buffalo, NY; Space 1026, Philadelphia, PA; Tate Britain, and the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, among other venues. They have self-published many collaborative, hand-drawn books including Howard the Duck (2003), Wish U Were Here (2002), Paper Rad#12 (2001), and Pony Tail of Tears (2001).

They have also produced several records including 3ROTFLOL: rolling on the floor laughing out loud (Autumn Records, 2003) and The Danger is On/Role the Dice (Papasiageek Records, 2002). ADDITIONAL NOTES SAVE the RaveS ++++++++++++++++++++ I rememeber getting an email one day from Paperrad in 2001. It contained a link to “ancient computing”. On that page I found a sad robot sitting on a cloud. if he jumped he would be smashed, but if he satyed he would be lonley forever. This was my introduction to paperrad. surfing back a directory i was introduced to a mess of a site. there were 1 million different colors, table art, animated background gifs, garbage color blue links, and pictures floating around in places only poorly coded HTML would know about. , form art, fort thunder, pure go4it geocities homepages, and pyramids. Like as if the 1990’s, extremem sports, and my little pony finally decided to have a party for peace. From that moment I was hooked. Remember that one tape you had of MTV that you would watch over and over again?