Metro Freako #32 resembles a tumultuous disaster scene straight out of a Hollywood B-movie. Its cartoonish, mutant monster wildly devours city dwellers and skyscrapers as they explode into fractures of day-glo colors.

Wall builds up his canvas with styrofoam, carves and undercuts it, and then coats it with bright, clashing acrylic paint. The resulting construction produces the startling effect of New York’s hilarity and fun gone awry, consumed now by urban angst, despair and a frenzied state of panic.

In the early 1980s, a number of young artists were attracted by low rents to the East Village area of New York City. The East Village was (somewhat ironically) described at the time as having “a unique blend of poverty, punk rock, drugs, arson, Hell's Angels, winos, prostitutes and dilapidated housing that adds up to an adventurous avant-garde setting.” Bruce Wall offers an East Village vision of life during the last decades of the twentieth century.