As most people either love Phoenix or loathe it, so it is with Phoenix’s gridlike nature. Oh, sure, there are a couple of roads that shamble drunkenly outside the lines – Galvin Parkway and the Squaw Peak Parkway, or whatever it’s now politically correctly called – but for the most part, the PHX street system might have been designed by Nazi goons. Budding Pythagorean theorists should be required to do a residency here. Perhaps we have a little Himmler in us, but we find it geometrically pleasing that Trunk Space’s new exhibition is about a grid within a grid. The show – “The Grid II: Documenting Phoenix Through the Lens” – is a sequel of sorts to Trunk’s inaugural art-photographic survey of the local environs in 2007. This “Grid” takes a much narrower view of the surroundings than its predecessor, which offered a macro view of the urban core. “Grid II” gets specific. In a format that would have tickled Albert Speer, the project’s 10 contributing photographers were each assigned one of 10 segments of downtown and encouraged to zoom in on their domain in search of the big picture and the small. The resulting images will be presented on the Trunk Space walls as an area map, with Thomas Road to the north, Buckeye Road to the south, 24th Street to the east, and 19th Avenue to the west. It’s all very gridlike, in an I-love-Phoenix kinda way. Sieg heil! The contributing artists are – in alpha order – Aaron Abbott, Sheila Bocchine, Stephanie Carrico, Steve Jansen, John Kittelsrud, Gary Millard, Kevin Patterson, Pete Petrisko, David Tabor, and Lisa Takata. (In the interest of full disclosure, Jansen is a full-time New Times staffer. However, that doesn’t make the show any less worth viewing.)
Fri., June 20, 6-9 p.m.; Fri., July 4, 6-10 p.m.; Fri., July 18, 6-9 p.m.; Fri., Aug. 1, 6-10 p.m., 2008