California-based artists Jeff
Soto and Maxx242 finished
their collaborative mural, “Love is Sacrifice,” at the Rochester Public Market early
on Tuesday. Afterward, Maxx put up a second, more traditional graffiti-style piece at Hudson Avenue and Dayton Street
of just the title script from the first painting.
“It represents the sacrifices we make, when we become
parents, for our families,” Maxx says. “I believe that family, or home, is
where everything begins — stability, direction, everything that makes a person.”
The mural at the market depicts a gaze-y woman’s face with
sugar-skull markings, crowned by an owl head with tree-branch antlers. This
symbolic headdress flows down over her shoulders into a hilly landscape dotted
with rocks and narrow prism-like spikes.
The piece includes imagery drawn from elements of each of
the artists’ lives and ancestry — cresting the owl’s head are the colors of the
Italian flag, and the hue of the roses surrounding her face is from Guatemala’s
banner.
Maxx is a first-generation American whose parents are from
Guatemala, and Soto says his ancestors hail from Italy, Portugal, and various other
places.
“Really for me, the piece symbolizes the ancestors who’ve
come over to the U.S. to start a new life,” Soto says.
Here and there in the mural’s landscape, bits of the branch-antlers have dropped off the headdress, as though sections of the family tree are deposited in specific locations as the main line moves forward in time and to unknown destinations.
The Italian side of Soto’s family settled in Avon and Geneseo about a century ago, and in the 1930’s and 40’s many
of them moved to Rochester. Just around the corner from the mural at Hudson and
Dayton, Soto points out a lot where an Italian relative’s house once stood.
“I’m kind of on this quest, on a journey to paint all of the
different places where my ancestors lived,” Soto says.
He got hooked up with WALL\THERAPY after he reached out to co-organizers
Ian Wilson and Erich Lehman, who were familiar with both Soto’s and Maxx’s
work. In addition to both having roots in graffiti and having successful design,
illustration, and fine art practices, the two have been painting together on
and off for 25 years.
Soto and Maxx met in high school in a drafting class, when
Soto was ditching gym class. Someone introduced them, and they quickly bonded over
art, music, skateboarding, and comic books.
They began painting together again five or six years ago after
about a decade-long break, during which professional careers were pursued and
families were started.
Soto and Maxx say the appreciation they feel for the
sacrifices of their ancestors and parents crystallized more fully when they
became parents themselves. Maxx speaks of this sacrifice as a crucial
redirection of energy and resources toward the new life that parents help shape.
In a way, the owl and woman portrait at the market is a kind
of forward-facing Janus — her
steady gaze simultaneously embodying gratitude for past sacrifices and ready to
yield what is necessary for the sake of the future.
This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2015.
