art, underground

"Street Art Way Below The Street" is a unique public spotlight for the Underbelly Project, an art exhibition whose location and curators remain anonymous.

What is it about abandoned space that is so captivating? It draws creation like a black hole, the void's existence immediately destroyed by the creator's gaze.
There's nothing here. Yet.

The photography's sparse, the scenes apocalyptic -- I can smell the musty air down there, the cloying humidity that is more reminiscent of fleshy cavities than empty concrete tubing. It's uncomfortable and comforting to be underground. It's safe and lonely, warm and chilling. I might temporarily feel good, but the inkling's unshakable -- something is not right.

When I think of all that time I spent on and in the Metro in DC, the melancholy creeps over me. No matter how many others milled around the platforms, no matter what time of day, I felt solitary under the domed brick, over the gray gum and the newspapers caught in breezes wafting from God knows where. The tracks glint from their beds, and the bells clang for you. Like the awareness that panic is coming but it's not yet here, my experience of underground structures has always been transport, a constant motion away from wherever it is you've been.

I imagine crawling into the bowels of the city and just... being there. Just for a while, the buzz of commuter traffic ceases and I climb along paths to nowhere, arriving at an art gallery wallpapered with the precious output of talented hands. A collection not only of their art but of the time and risk it took to be in that space and make something, and leave it there. By now, one of my imaginary selves is sweating profusely and tugging at her collar wanting out Out OUT of the suffocating dark, the tomb I can't trust. The other imaginary self is speechlessly oblivious to the surroundings in light of the fascinating work in that spacious cave, visually devouring, touching the wet walls and craning her neck up at the enormity of such a project. An abandoned space, teaming with life.

What is valued there? Is art for the beholder or the beholden, the maker or the made? If a tree falls in the wood... the tree will know. Is the act of creation enough cause to spend and risk so much?