A look back into Unstable Mutations

 

As you come closer and peer into the four walls of vinyl on vinyl, notice it peering back. It cannot be misconstrued, the countless eyes that breathe life into the dark, black walls of the gallery. Take a look and it will take a look back.

Forms, all seemingly familiar yet hauntingly unknown, are sewn together, with no purpose of physical fluidity, weaving threads of irony and creating a harmony of chaotic madness; a fair share of unstable mutations.

With the creeping feeling where the unknown seems familiar, Rai Cruz finds refuge.

Rai Cruz’s one-man show ‘Unstable Mutations’ is nothing short of unforgettable. Bringing street art into the confines of inner space is in itself a feat, but he goes one step further and plays along with all kinds of creatures, from the strange to the even stranger.

For his first one-man show, Rai Cruz has made a pretty big impression.

City Creatures

Katrina Stuart Santiago

October 2012

The task of moving street art from public to private space demands a necessary reassessment of its value. Graffiti after all is necessarily a form of resistance, it’s presence on public walls carrying the weight of rebellion. Its move to the gallery is graffiti’s undoing, where the largeness of street art can only be stunted.

Unstable Mutations is a set of works that do not fall into this trap, even as it is in a gallery, even when its images are borne of the streets. These are not works made smaller by the move into private space, as these are works that co-exist with its larger versions on public walls.

Think of it as an extension of the city streets, the creatures here the new members of the community that public art inevitably builds.

And it is a nation of creatures that grow out of the city’s concreteness, that are borne of its daily grind. Whether large and on public walls, or small and hanging in a gallery, these images speak of a city at the crux of development and destruction, where everything evolves into unknowable and unfamiliar, living and breathing, bodies. Ones that respond to the city’s demands, ones who make up the marginal narratives we do not hear, the people we do not see.

Those who live off our cities become creatures of its undoing and decay. That they seem to be in constant evolution is there instability. That they grow more and more creatively is the gift of urbanity and development. These are the city’s inhabitants we refuse to see, the ones whose noise we do not hear, the ones we leave behind as we enter the comfortable clean walls of the homes we build.

The power of denial is such that we do not know our own reflections.

But we have no choice now. They are here.