: SELECTED PRESS / ESSAYS

WASHINGTON CITY PAPER
Resolutionz
By Mark Jenkins
December 26, 2003

Much of the art in Decatur Blue's new group show is big, bold, and brightly hued, but the exemplary pieces are Jose Ruiz's four oversized labels, which both identify and are themselves artworks. Bearing the names of such pieces as What You See Is What You Get, these parodies of curatorial meticulousness prove that there's still plenty of life in Duchamp's anti-art gags. Elsewhere, the Blue brothers forgo such niceties. The other works are identified by legends scrawled on the wall, or not at all. The ghosts of Dada and surrealism also animate such works as Ruiz's The Veil of Machismo, a massive mustache, Ryan Hacketts's fur-swathed Electrovisual Sound Control Center, and an untitled piece by Brian Balderston whose rough wooden form gradually reveals itself to be a football stadium. There's also a pop-art sensibility in Gabriel Martinez's hand-drawn consumer products and the show's crisply defined blocks of vivid color. Ruiz gives his 'stache a lustrous yellow backdrop, Martinez's Welcome--one of the show's relatively few paintings--is a comic-book-style jungle scene with red lettering atop the various greens, and Champneys Taylor's The New Handball Court is a green and blue landscape/abstraction set off by a pile of shiny orange clementines. Although one of the collective's collective pieces--an inflatable clear-plastic environment--is basically colorless, the other is a spaceage bachelor room in pastel shades. Like most of this show, it's as hip and glossy as a French fashion magazine.