The Union of Maine Visual Artists Gallery at CTN at 516 Congress Street announces its November exhibition colliding in space > < (ur) ban street art by photographer and historian John Ripton. The show features more than 30 photographic images of street art on deteriorating walls from cities in several regions of the world. Mr. Ripton recorded these urban images over the last two decades. He refers to the images as art detritus, “urban street art…that emerges from the interplay of largely anonymous artists, vandals, public officials, entrepreneurs, local weather, and neglect.”

colliding in space > < (ur) ban street art offers viewers an opportunity to explore the beauty, irony, tension, conflict and promise in these striking images of city walls from Portland, Maine to Israel, Spain, France, Japan and the Caribbean. While works of major street artists are represented in the collection of images in the show, it is the collision of ideas, line, color and weather that is more important to Mr. Ripton. “These images are literally the 'handwriting on the wall' of the 21 century,”asserts the photographer, “the detritus resulting from chaos and collapse that gives rise to new vision, to a new world.”

John Ripton has mounted a dozen solo exhibitions in Mid-Atlantic and New England galleries. In 2010 his solo show at the Hunterdon Art Museum in New Jersey included several of the photographs in the upcoming exhibition in November. Most recently, one of his art detritus images was selected for exhibition at photoville, one of the world's premier photography festivals in Brooklyn, New York.

colliding in space > < (ur) ban street art will be on exhibition from November 4th to November 30th. The Opening Reception is First Friday, November 4th, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at UMVA Gallery at CTN at 516 Congress Street in Portland. Contact: jartphotos@gmail.com  (908) 399-2706