Garbage day in Virginia Beach fell on Wednesday when Joe Grillo and Laura Grant were in high school. Students at a private art school, they bonded one afternoon in 1995 when, along with Laura’s younger brother, Billy, they accidentally set a neighbor’s house on fire with homemade fireworks; soon they were spending all their time together, taking acid and making collages and paintings out of stuff they found at thrift stores–or in the trash. “We were hours late to school on trash day,” says Laura, “’cause that’s when they’d have the weirdest shit.”
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As Paperrad, the collective shot several animated music videos for a forthcoming DVD about Providence noise band Lightning Bolt, one of whose members used to live in an abandoned jewelry warehouse turned underground performance venue called Fort Thunder. The videos, some shot with cameras customized with lenses from toy kaleidoscopes, cast cutout stills of Gumby, Cap’n Crunch, and other B-list cartoon celebrities against backdrops of candy-colored swirls, skulls, found photos, and cartoons bootlegged off TV. The chaotic aesthetic was in sync with the general vibe of Fort Thunder in its heyday. The rotating cast of inhabitants, many of them students at the Rhode Island School of Design, had transformed the gigantic space into a surreal environment–some doors were barely big enough to crawl through, walls jutted out at odd angles, and the whole place was decorated floor to ceiling with toys, trash, drawings, and sculpture. When Grillo visited the space he thought, “Wow! You can do this with your life?” Though Fort Thunder was demolished in 2001, after graduating last year he moved to Providence, and Laura, who’d gone west in 2000 to attend CalArts, decided to take a year off from school and join him.
“I’m psyched about life right now,” says Grillo. “I get to wake up every day and make art.”
