Search Party

Matt Haywood Raymie Iadevaia Michael Gac Levin Bruna Massadas

My Pet Ram is excited to present Search Party.

Imagine these four painters wading through dark woods, spread out, in a line, flashlights in hand. The beams overlap, double bright at the edges. Each scans the ground in front of them. Bruna trips over a dormant volcano while looking at an iridescent bird. Raymie sees a cat, lowers his hand to it, then screams that the forest is on fire. Matt was lighting candles everywhere, looking through his fingers like old window frames. In the long shadows, Michael finds his childhood dinner table and goes to sleep, mumbling about cut challahs and uncut pears. The warble of life, like a steam, surrounds the party of four. Something important vanished here once. They all know it. They watched it happen in a dream. They are here together, looking, to keep the memory fresh.

Humor and instinct guide the work of these painters, an automatism as honest as walking. Each step—taken without plan or forethought, but in the same purposeful rhythm—reveals new forms, new clues, new constellations. The rocks are relaid, branches mended, the heartbeat of this forest spawns new bones, brought to life. Each marking along their path adds up like a map in four moveable parts, all charted in kaleidoscopic color, and corpulent, quivering lines. In all its permutations, it traces the way back from waking, back into dream, into a shared experience.

Matt Haywood (b. 1985, Detroit, Michigan) Received his BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Based In Los Angeles, California, he was a founding member of LA based artist run space Also, where he curated numerous group and solo exhibitions. His most recent personal solo exhibition was at O’ Project Space in Los Angeles. He has been featured in print and interviewed online by Art Maze Magazine, and is currently featured on AucArt. He has also been featured numerously by the beloved Mothflower Instagram account. He has exhibited in group shows from Los Angeles, to Mexico City, to Berlin.

Raymie Iadevaia (b. 1984, Newport Beach, CA) is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA. He received a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from Art Center College of Design. Recent group exhibitions include, 10 Years at Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton; Run with the Wolves at The Pit, Los Angeles; and Office Group Show at Bozomag, Los Angeles.

Michael Gac Levin (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator. He has recently exhibited at Woody Gallery (solo), Ortega y Gasset Projects, and Bankside Gallery. His work has been featured in Artmaze Magazine and Maake Magazine, and he has completed special projects online for the Jewish Museum and Screen_. He holds a BA in Classics from the University of Chicago (‘06) and an MFA in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute (‘15), where he currently teaches.

Bruna Massadas (b. 1985, Rio de Janeiro) lives and works in Bozeman, Montana. She received a BFA from California State University, Fullerton in 2009 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2012. Massadas’ first solo exhibition, The Face Painter, was at Guerrero Gallery in 2018. Recent exhibitions include Cult Aimee Friberg Exhibitions in San Francisco, Bozomag in Los Angeles and The Pit in Los Angeles. Massadas is an adjunct professor at Montana State University, Bozeman.