: SELECTED PRESS / ESSAYS

SECOND STREET GALLERY
DC Now (catalogue essay)
By Stacey Schmidt (curator)
October 2004

[excerpt]
Multimedia artist José Ruiz is known for his absurdist and often subversive conceptual works, such as his Veil of Machismo (a large mustache on canvas) or What You See is What You Get (a gigantic museum label). Co-founder of the Washington collective Decatur Blue, Ruiz’s blackhole-whitevoid takes three word groups as starting points: “black holes,” “escape patterns,” and “air & space.” The resulting work integrates performance, documentary video, including footage made on Charlottesville’s streets, and site-specific installation to investigate the experience of these scientific phrases by way of skateboarding and Roadrunner cartoons.