for the folks who did not have a chance to check us out.
A review of the show:
Saturday, August 11, 2007
The Writing on the Walls – Of Love & Riots @ 58 Coles – Jersey City, NJ
Category: Art and Photography
There's a lot one could say about the current show at 58 Coles
(www.myspace.com/58coles – Of Love & Riots put on by the Trust Your
Struggle Collective www.trustyourstruggle.com. There's the art – a
blend of mural painting, relief, found object, and graffiti –
installed with the haste of an illicit tag by the artists this past
week and accented with candles and a live dj for the opening. Then
there are the political and social messages – oppression and the
struggle for social justice. And of course there are the artists
themselves – Borish, Cece, Erin "Charm" Yoshioka, Miguel "Bounce"
Perez, Robert Trujillo, Shaun Turner, Scott La Rockwell, DJ Jonny
Paycheck, DJ King Tres – and their collective movement – Trust Your
Struggle – based out of the San Fransisco Bay area and New York City.
It's safe to say we all know what love is – deep human empathy and
connection. While a riot is usually understood to be a violent public
disturbance, violent disorder or confusion, riot also refers to a
brilliant display, as in "a riot of colors;" to grow wild in
abundance; and, something very funny. The Trust Your Struggle
collective puts together a floor to ceiling display of love and the
struggle for dignity, reminding us of our shared human connections.
Entering the gallery you are pushed back by a phalanx of wooden
soldiers, helmets, shields, and guns bulging out of the wall – a
present day vision of Uccello's Battle of San Romano. The effect is to
transform you from a mere spectator to an active participant in an
ongoing human struggle. To remind you that both inside and outside the
gallery walls you are always already under assault and part of a real
and vital war for dignity and justice. Moving through the space, we
come upon two altars commemorating both death and the anonymous masked
revolutionaries among us who resist the ongoing assault on our dignity
and that of our family and friends. We are asked both to recognize
them and meditate upon what this means to us, as we bow are heads to
watch the flickering candles on the floor. An oversize portrait of an
adolescent gangster watches over the whole scene, proudly displaying
his camaraderie while his eyes betray fear and a sense of resignation.
While the mood of the front room communicates feelings of anger,
frustration, indignation, and fear, the work in the back room back
room bears witness to the personal sadness and pain. We see the
victims and are asked to recognize of family and friends, to feel
compassion and empathy, to connect with their humanity.
On Friday night of the opening, friends chatted with friends,
strangers chatted with strangers. A vibe of love was in the air,
coursing through our bodies with the beats of the music spun by the
two djs. An impromptu dance circle formed with beautiful bodies moving
and shaking and sweating together. And I hope everyone like me had a
riot.
-Gordon
www.gordonfraserfinearts.com
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The Jersey Journal
MURAL EVOKES GLOBAL MESSAGE
Friday, August 24, 2007
By MICHAEL
VENUTOLO-MANTOVANI
JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
I s there a common ground on which two complete opposites could co-exist?
In a setting that seemed like it should have been some battleground, plucked out of a hellacious urban wasteland, seedy and downtrodden, came a night of often overwhelming beauty and intensity as the Trust Your Struggle Collective descended on Downtown Jersey City to bring their brand of graffiti protest to the walls (and floors) of 58 Coles.
Spread across nearly every possible inch of 58's visage, Of Love & Riots, 58's August exhibit, took the gallery space into itself, making the line between artist and viewer, gallery and canvas, curator and commentator blur to a point where a person could have just as easily been a part of the world that Trust Your Struggle had created.
Wildly foreboding, advancing walls of stormtroopers, AK-47 toting youngsters, terrified mothers and their young all splashed the surrounding walls with vibrant hues of red, orange, gray and black.
Juxtaposed with exuberant images of joy, satisfaction and humor, the pieces became more significant as they mirrored what we see in globe-spanning-life each and every day. The boy with a smiling baby face holding his assault rifle or the sexy Latin woman, full of color and life, beckoning you closer as she stands next to masked gunmen, waiting to cut you down.
The mix of 2-dimensional wall art and 3-D dioramic reliefs made the threshold of 58 nearly disappear, begging the viewer to wonder when he or she left the often harrowing real world and entered the sanctity of art - the safety of walls.
With a crowd packed in, wall-to-wall, mixing and mingling among the art, often becoming part of the mural and members of the riotous, acrylic army, the show was a rousing triumph.
"I think it was a great success," 58's curator Orlando Reyes said. "Anytime you can stir up revolutionary thoughts or feelings without resorting to violence is great. And that's exactly what they did."
But the immersion didn't end at the walls.
Strewn across the dark tile floors of 58 Coles were extensions of the wall's spray-can cast of characters. Big clusters of candles jutted out from what seemed like ramshackle altars built of found objects, sometimes adding commotion to the foot traffic but always reeling the viewer further into what became a little universe that we were all trapped, although willingly, inside.