(SCENE) Metrospace, an East Lansing gallery devoted to the unconventional, will open The Urban Show on Friday as a freshly devised creative medium, stressing the importance of diversifying artistic legitimacy.
"The mission is to expose the community to things you're not going to find in sales-oriented galleries around town," said Director and Curator Peter Richards about the local gallery. "We sell stuff, but that's not our primary focus."
Richards described the unique new exhibit as a delicate formula of an emerging street culture and a technical display of artistic interpretation.
"The whole idea is to present urban art and culture through two avenues — specifically the 'street artist' and issues dealing with urban decay," he said.
One of the primarily expressed objectives of the exhibit is to give a certain credibility to street creativity, an area in which Richards finds either commonly overlooked or regarded with an unjust level of disdain.
"A big emphasis is a playing with the idea of legitimacy with mediums like graffiti," he said. "Often, it's no matter how beautiful the graffiti is — as soon as it's up someone comes and paints a big white square over it."
MSU art department Chairman Thomas Berding offered a professional take on the contemporary medium.
"Street-level forms of expression and so-called fine arts have been going on for more than a hundred years," Berding said. "The beauty of the dialogue of art is that it's always absorbing, interfacing and changing its own definition of itself … that's why art is such a vital language. Its parameters are always changing."
The exhibit will feature an assortment of about 50 contemporary pieces, including abstract and realistic paintings, sculptures, motion art, graffiti — even works as bizarre as actual pieces of concrete.
The Urban Show's various pieces are primarily submitted and extracted from numerous locations statewide. However, some of the abstractions are on display from areas all over the nation.
"Bringing (urban art) into a gallery setting is what I think is most important," Richards said. "It's sad that it hasn't really been treated as a legitimate form of art."
The new exhibit will offer a subversive and intricate take on creative theory. "The idea of language is always unfolding in the visual arts. It doesn't have any kind of grammar that's a constant," Berding said. "I think it's an absolutely legitimate enterprise (urban art), and as an idea I think it's fabulous."
The Urban Show premieres with a free public reception at 6 p.m. on Friday at the (SCENE) Metrospace Gallery, 303 Abbott Road.
