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WASHINGTON POST
Dark Displays of the American Dream / G Fine Art Exhibit Bares The Underbelly of Privilege (excerpt)
By Jessica Dawson
Saturday, June 9, 2007; Page C02

At G Fine Art, three artists hold a mirror to America the not-so-beautiful. Together they explore opportunism, exploitation and the compulsion to hide dirty secrets under a patina of gentility.

Artist José Ruiz's installation, "Descendents of Ascension," sets up the exhibition's central themes. The erstwhile District resident ran art collective Decatur Blue before heading west for graduate school and then on to New York. Ruiz has always had an inventive, spontaneous approach, and this installation's ad hoc nature reflects that. It looks very much as if someone started a repair job in an art gallery. Conventions of the art world and Home Depot set get equal, if incongruous, exposure.

Ruiz positioned two stepladders fashioned out of drywall beside a smattering of bright construction lights illuminating an unfinished gallery wall. Nearby, he's installed typical art gallery fare: two video works, a wall-size photo-based mural and a pair of color photographs. The effect is almost off-putting. But the concepts Ruiz is getting at make grappling with the work worth the effort.

Two distinct conversations emerge. One involves the fate of undocumented Hispanic workers in America, something that seems particularly relevant after a week of Senate debate on a controversial immigration-overhaul bill.

The other dialogue is about the accepted practice of artists subcontracting their work to others. This started in earnest among contemporary artists when minimalists such as Donald Judd outsourced their metal boxes to industrial manufacturers. Today, the practice has become so common that it's beginning to look a little exploitative. Or at least that's what Ruiz suggests.

Presiding over Ruiz's installation are two pairs of two-foot-long raptor wings filled in with rippling American flags, seemingly descending from the heavens. Ruiz didn't make the decals -- he ordered them from an Indiana-based airbrush artist he found by Googling "patriotic eagle wings." The wings lend the installation a campy note while nodding to the work's title, "Descendents of Ascension," which suggests the upward tug of American ambitions.

But another issue arises here: By ordering these pieces, Ruiz raises a tricky issue. Maybe he's the exploiter of another's cottage industry. Those decals, which we assume he bought for $75 a pair, now sell for exponentially more -- thanks to their association with the artist and their exhibition in a gallery. (At G, the wings go for $500 a set.)

But when Ruiz places himself in the position of an undocumented Hispanic worker, as he does in two photographs here, the artist puts himself on the other side of the exploitation question. He had himself photographed standing alongside a group of men awaiting day labor jobs. (Ruiz is a Peruvian citizen who carries a U.S. green card.) The men wait for hours in strip mall parking lots, staying in small groups until a car rolls up with a prospective boss at the wheel. Then they swarm the car to make a deal. In Ruiz's hands, the day labor market has never looked quite so much like prostitution. And, perhaps, the art world as well.