"Razkuache"

Patricia Acosta’s paintings of women are tacky—and that’s the point. Their layers of glitter, fabric, plastic baubles and glow-in-the-dark, star-shaped stickers reflect the core values of rasquachismo, the Chicano artistic movement that inspired this show.

Rasquache art (according to the gallery, the show’s alternate spelling connotes a “postmodern…Pilsen/Chicago spin”) recycles lowly, discarded objects into personal and political statements. The mixed-media works on view mine humor from old toys, news clippings and other kinds of cultural debris, as in curator Marcos Raya’s The Emperor of Disorder (2008). Below a painting of a man in clown makeup (pictured), Raya sets up a platform—labeled GETTING OVER PHOBIA AGAINST MALICIOUS CLOWNS—for giant orange shoes and other clown paraphernalia. The display includes clown-face photographs of John McCain, Hillary Clinton and President Bush. (Could Raya be dissatisfied with the government?) Other figurative pieces criticize American violence abroad; in Ricardo Santos Hernández’s Razkuache Americanos (2008), a fat man wearing an American-flag shirt ogles strippers instead of acknowledging the skulls heaped throughout the painting.

It’s too bad there are no curatorial notes explaining why the show’s other artists represent rasquachismo. We love Kenneth Morrison’s eerie bone sculptures, but it’s unclear how they address Chicano concerns. The work on view is strong, but our grasp of a vital local art form remains regrettably weak.