Art Review: Ephemera(lity)

Eli Ruhala and Tad Greenlaw search for lost time at Ro2 Art

“Rusted Warfare” is one of the few real time strategies (RTS) that can be confidently played “head empty”. It’s basic premise is as simple as an RTS can get, but it’s depth of play is still deep enough to engage with hours on end.

“Rusted Warfare” is a sci-fi RTS inspired by older RTS designs similar to “Command and Conquer: Red Alert” and the original MS-DOS “Dune”, but with design and mechanics adjustments to bring that old style of RTS to the modern age. There is no story, though there is a series of single player missions to be played, but the premise of the game is simple: Build extractors for money, build factories to build units, raise an army to kill the other ones and win the game.

And this is why it can feel like a “head empty” game: more so than other RTS’s, the basic mechanics are much simpler to pick up and play with. The factories aren’t complicated, and the only resource is money, in comparison to a game like “Starcraft 2” where resource management and placement plays as much a role as figuring out what all the units do. The units are easy to grasp, with the main units being a variety of tanks, planes, and battleships. You can boot up “Rusted Warfare”, decide that today you will make a bomber air force to command, and enjoy taking to the skies against some hapless AI.

However, this is a very simple view of the game that has a lot of depth to it. Not only is the gameplay experience much smoother than old RTS’s, with unit pathing and selection being smooth as butter, but the game offers full customizability of hotkeys. The hardcore RTS fan can engage with this aspect to the extreme, optimizing the entire keyboard to quickly switch between controlling different army groups, workers, and production buildings in the span of a few milliseconds.

And the hotkeys aren’t the only things that can be experimented with. Upgrading the basic production factories affords access to more futuristic and experimental units, from aircraft that can shoot lightning to shielded hover tanks that can act as siege units. The army compositions that you can come up with are wide and varied, offering a lot of strategic depth (especially since it isn’t the most balanced game ever).

But let’s say that you miss controlling infantry. Or that the AI isn’t hard enough. Or you just want to play a World War 2 version of “Rusted Warfare”. Lucky for you, there’s mods! Being a Steam game, it’s easy to find and install whatever mods you desire, with all the ideas mentioned above being existing mods on the Steam Workshop. There are many mods to find for a game as cheap as this, adding to the depth of a game that already has plenty for an RTS player to sink their teeth into.

Overall, “Rusted Warfare” is a surprisingly deep, well-made, and polished old school RTS experience. If you want to indulge in the army commander fantasy, this is one of the best $5 ways to go about it.

(Rating: 4/5)

Reading the press release for Eli Ruhala and Tad Greenwald’s partner show, “Ephemera(lity),” a stark déjà vu set in. The purple descriptions of “transitory moments” and “human experience” seemed to be plucked straight from my freshman year lit major mind. They’re the academic’s version of magazine collage ransom notes: hodge-podge and reused. They’re that emphatic “society” tossed into every pseudo social justice warrior’s vocabulary. Thankfully, Ruhala and Greenwald, though fresh off the boat of academia, exceed expectations with work that curtails the pull of time by redirecting focus onto empirically candid narratives.

Both educated at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ruhala and Greenwald are new artists in the gallery scene. With only a few prior exhibitions, their recent opening was met with a particularly buzzing anticipation and interest in what they had in store. Ruhala’s drywall painting expresses a knack for the experimental while Greenwald’s watercolor technique speaks of expert training. I can’t help but feel the artists were cheated out of solo exhibitions though, as both bodies of work express equally finished and unique concepts. Redeeming this, an optimistic appreciation of the mundane and forgettable draws a clearer connection between both artist’s work.

In first viewing Ruhala’s work, I felt notably lost. Whether I lost track of time digesting his work or trapped in the memorial space of his stories, my mind bowed and ached in rough waters. Ruhala’s sedimentary compositions expose the layers of age and memory in context to their narratives. Like counting rings on a tree for age, I scope the highly textured surface for answers.

Take for instance “Fragments (CrossDress),” where Ruhala depicts five chronological self-portraits in an excavated collage. From left to right, versions of the artist pose in wigs, dresses and bralettes. The autobiographical confrontation of his masculinity breaks with the notion that queer children always “grow into their own” or the counterargument’s less convincing, “they are born queer.” Instead, the specific,

"Hopefully I did

For most freshmen at UTD, the beginning of their college journeys probably entails something like a road trip from halfway across the country, a chaotic day moving into a residence hall or the still-mandatory first day of school picture as they leave the house for a day of classes on campus.

For international students, that journey often starts thousands of miles away, with airport or hometown goodbyes. For Samin Rahman, an ITS freshman from Bangladesh, it began on New Year’s Eve 2020 at 30,000 feet.

“Technology is so weird—I am writing this status from the airplane,” Rahman wrote in a Facebook post that day as he traveled to Dallas for the first time. “I am stoked for the decade that lies ahead, full of personal leaps and challenges.”

It is perhaps a bit ironic that Rahman’s experience studying in the U.S. coincided with the dawn of a new year. But that flight marked what was simply the next chapter in a journey that had already begun months before when Rahman began the lengthy and complicated process of applying to colleges as an international student.

After encountering difficulties with admissions and financial aid applications, Rahman turned his own experiences as an international student into a platform to help others going through the same process. He launched a YouTube channel in August 2020 on which he chronicles everything about the U.S. college application process, from how to ace the SAT and secure financial aid to applying for an F-1 visa and navigating international travel and luggage restrictions.

When he first started applying to U.S. universities in 2020, Rahman found that his friends encountered the same problems that he had. He first started offering advice in a Facebook group for Bangladeshis trying to study internationally, and that’s when he realized how helpful a YouTube channel could be for other students in his position.

The channel has grown rapidly, with more than 66,000 views, and viewership is increasing in India, Nepal and Pakistan. Rahman said that he will likely start to focus on those geographic areas more in the next few months.

“The response from others has been spectacular; it’s been amazing. In fact, I think I am probably the admission guide that people look up to back in Bangladesh,” he said. “That also means that I have a lot of responsibility on my shoulders … to fact check everything that I say because what I say is literally the gold standard.”

Rahman’s channel offers something else that’s important to prospective international students: glimpses into life at an American university. Viewers saw Rahman ride out active snapshots rise from their shallow grave speaking not what they “were/are” but what they “did/do.”

“[To] make my feelings into an actual piece and put it out there…that’s the part for me that’s creating the home,” Ruhala said.

Like the materials he uses, Ruhala takes ideas of gender identity and expounds them into the most active of terms. He builds a house for his identity, and, like any well-kept house, it operates in a sustained level of flux, accepting renovations as they come.

Most of Ruhala’s work is not about the artist at all. Paintings of his partner, Joseph, outnumber any other subject and exude a palpable affection with even Ruhala himself saying,

“The work isn’t just about me, it’s about him [Joseph] at the end of the day.”

In the vein of artists like Alice Neel and Egon Schiele, Ruhala captures his partner with veristic honesty and indefatigable passion. With every subtle feature blown up and ¬over accounted for, he imbues the subject with the whole weight of his expression. And this weight manifests in unconventional uses of joint compound (usually a construction material). Once this weight builds up, a sturdy tenderness stands simply because it was made to. The household materials eek with potential, a potential I hope to see realized in his future career.

As for Greenwald, his work is much less alive. Watercolors of broken down and rusting cars make up what looks like an ad for automobile repair. You could almost slap on the name Clay Cooley and hang it above the tire sales rack. This is not to say his work is lifeless advertisement, but instead that his watercolor technique is so refined that his art looks photographic. These southwestern still-lives appear straight out of a Tennessee Williams production, encapsulating the drawling decay of southern life. Not just ordinary southern life, I’m talking sweet tea and muddin’ southern life.

Even though like in “Three Sedans in Marathon, TX,” Greenwald gives specific callit-like-he-sees-it descriptions of the pieces, the subjects still seem distant and obscure. The

make a change"

the February winter storm and came along for a day at TopGolf. They also navigated pandemic-era international travel with him as he tried to get home to Bangladesh after the spring semester. With campus opening up again, Rahman hopes that he’ll be able to offer even more of this content to viewers.

“This semester, you will probably find me doing random videos and vlogs around UTD, asking people those questions that content creators do in YouTube channels,” he said.

Studying internationally—particularly in the U.S. and Canada—is a goal for probably eight out of 10 Bangladeshi students, Rahman said. But only one or two of those eight actually apply due to the complexity of studying internationally. Rahman hopes that number will increase as his channel sheds light on the process. He already has a Facebook community for his followers to share advice and is in the process of developing a college admissions blog.

In addition to the immigration hurdles international students face, they don’t have the same support systems that many American high schools have. Bangladeshi students usually do not have college counselors, and people are often hesitant to write recommendation letters because they