: SELECTED PRESS / ESSAYS

WASHINGTON POST
Here and Now
By Blake Gopnik
Sunday, July 3, 2005; Page N02

[excerpt]
In the side room at G, Washington artist Jose Ruiz also has a two-screen video, but this time the screens are the size of a large book. One screen shows a white man, dressed in black, spray-painting black graffiti onto a pure white wall. The other screen shows a white-dressed, dark-skinned man -- the artist, in fact -- laboring to undo that graffiti by spray-painting over it in white. The work’s about mark-making and its fragility; it’s about censorship, and the right -- or not -- to express yourself in public space. It’s about purity and encroachment, order and entropy -- and about which one of these two artists stand for which.