At the 10 Year Anniversary Show at White Walls Gallery in San Francisco, one can explore the works of artists who have been responsible for injecting the world of contemporary art with street art and graffiti culture. Their work subverts, reinvents and pokes fun at the traditional art experience without compromising their aesthetics.

Upon entering the exhibit, one sees a giant taxidermied deer’s head with golden bazookas for horns standing guard over the center of the large room. On one wall, a silhouette of the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is filled in and colored with pharmaceutical pills — a kaleidoscope only visible upon closer examination. Another canvas shows what looks like a standard anthropological-looking layout of vases and urns contradicting with their psychedelic colors and patterns.

The group show touts street-art icon Shepard Fairey as its headliner for the layman street-art fan, but his piece, though monumental in size, doesn’t spark the same interest as the more interactive and multimedia work of the other artists.

Russell Young’s multiple five-foot-tall prints of hot-pants-clad Kate Moss posing with a teddy bear compete with the also seductive but more inexplicably creepy print by Sean Murdock of a ballerina with a cartoon rabbit’s head. We see convergences between media, subjects and styles of different artists within the show, but it is truly the variety of the show that makes it outstanding.

All of these pieces both harmonize and repel each other but essentially offer a wide-lens look at the different progressions of street and graffiti culture in contemporary art. Stencils and spray paint are present but not as the groundbreaking media they once were decades ago and usually are not used alone.

Gregory Euclide pays homage to the power of paint in his “Capture” series. He turns a paint can on its side and uses the solidified blue puddle that spills out as a backdrop for nature dioramas, adding miniature  trees, brush, rocks and moss around it. One finds oneself bending down to peer past the pondlike puddle and into the paint can, searching for what else lies in the delicate forests.

These mini-ecosystems made from industrial material sit on a pedestal in front of ROA’s piece, smaller than his usual paintings of wild animals that span multiple stories on buildings. He has taken a large segment of wood painted with a scaly armadillo, and he demonstrates his talent for manipulating space and architecture for visual effects. From a purely frontal view, the armadillo seems content, perhaps a little sleepy. But once one walks to the right, the wood reveals itself not as a solid block but a half-pipe segment on its side. You also discover what’s painted on the curve — a gaping wound in the middle of its torso, oozing intestines and spider-webbed with shredded muscle fibers.

This jarring viewing experience underlies many of the pieces in the show. Even the most mainstream-successful artist of the show, Shepard Fairey, taps into morbidity with his large-scale canvas of a baby-faced child soldier equipped with both a machine gun and a red bow. This piece is titled “The Duality of Humanity.” It would be a generalization to say that street-influenced art is always dark. However, some of of the most successful pieces have never been afraid to question and transform their specific surroundings both physically and psychologically.

One of the pieces by the duo Herakut titled “So You Really Fear Me ‘Cause I’m Different?” also accurately describes the show’s attitude. Flirting with an interest in the sublime has pushed these artists to defy our eyes, question our society and make us squirm. White Walls has already dubbed these artists as the “backbone” of their success in the past 10 years, and looking at both the authority of its anniversary show, as well as the other shows now on display, one can be convinced that the gallery will continue to encourage dynamic artistic progress in the coming decade as well.

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