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Where the magic happens.You may be surprised when you walk into Hot Box Betty expecting pretty
things and are confronted by Jaws and Dead Birds. Not that the
paintings by Alex Reisfar aren't beautiful - they are.

Reisfar's work has a Latin American influence; the figures are rendered
like those of Diego Rivera or Antonio Ruiz. In Maria and Child, the
breastfeeding mother's hair transforms into artery and umbilical cord
ala Frida Kahlo, while her masked face draws from the indigenous
revolution. "In parts of the Zapatista movement, they have these
pamphlets, and the imagery in them, especially the female Zapatistas,
is very powerful," Reisfar says. While initially surrealist, Reisfar's
paintings are not about dream worlds, but full of intentionally applied
symbols. The drama in the work is not happenstance from the
subconscious, but grounded, as he says, in "anarchist history and
theory." One piece is blatantly anti-war; a soldier with a leering
skull greets a smiling baby and a female figure that cannot face him or
the viewer. In El Cazadore, a great white shark signifies a menacing
force ("great white: GW," Reisfar points out) while a Zapatista child
stands in defiance. In Gaurdian, a Native American child begins to
unravel. Reisfar is confronting big subject matter: death, organized
religion, war, propaganda and white guilt.