Mission Detritus 2002
The streets are the stuff that art is made of in "Mission Detritus." Acrylic housepaint, plywood planks, graffiti tags and discarded library books all find their way into this streetwise group show. The art on display reflects the striking individuality you'd encounter on a Mission sidewalk, but also delivers a welcome collective catharsis for the economic, environmental and personal pressures of urban living.

Andrew Schoultz's moving painting "Almost" shows cartoon birds imprisoned in bottles, struggling to escape and take to the air with their birdhouses in tow. Birds from the bottles marked "scum," "take and take" and (on a more hopeful note) "dreamer" have managed to find their way out of the bottle, but the birds still frantically pecking their way out include those in bottles labeled "lovers," "grace," "Ray Patlan" (for the esteemed San Francisco Chicano muralist, recently taken ill) and "Tenants' Union of San Francisco" (for the group that lost an important legal battle to landlords over Proposition H).

Michael Eli takes a wry approach to the recent flight of capital and its attendant yuppies in "Pigeons and Statues," wherein layers of Plexiglas reveal a flying pigeon, the splatters it leaves behind and faint but pointed commentary -- "Flown the coop" and "Good riddance to the greedy grubbers" are discernible. Eli's piercing visual satire doesn't let anyone off easily, though: If the winged rat-racers have flown away, then presumably those of us who remain are the shat-upon statues.

Christopher Ruess also puts visual metaphor to shrewd satirical use in "All Others," where two shopping carts converge around an abstract fruit like sperm vying for the egg, with the stamped shopkeeper's dictum "In God We Trust / All Others Pay Cash."

Alena Rudolph's striking "Silent Passing" is a twilight landscape in clashing retro green and pink, as birds take flight from power lines the silhouettes of low-slung ranch houses merge with the tree line. Gray boxes interrupt the pink expanse of sky, an unsettling imposition of inorganic structures that subtly echoes the effrontery of unchecked real estate development.

Kyle Ranson's untitled nude embodies anxiety with its blood-red background, grafittied haste, Egon Schiele-inspired bony, tensile form and arrow piercing the rib cage of this modern-day St. Sebastian.

James Kirkpatrick provides clever comic relief with a hint of underlying tension with his tightly packed, intricately painted and scratched image of a catlike creature holding forth in the foreground, while a mythic horse creature in high heels appears to shy away. These creatures are too close for comfort, it would appear -- but like the rest of us, they somehow have to find their place in the space allotted them.