Power lines, windmills, water reservoirs, cell phone towers, are things that often escape our attention.  These essential objects are part of the infrastructure that makes our society function. Without them we couldn’t turn on our lights, or call our friends and yet we often see them as eyesores or not at all.

Tracing Lines is an exhibit at the Urban Arts Space that explores the parts of our landscape that we tend to edit out.  The images illuminate a beauty in the infrastructure.  There’s Alexandra copley’s  photograph of power lines cutting geometrically through an azure sky.  The ghost like architecture of a power plant in the distance by Ralph Prince. With a wide variety of mediums, each piece in Tracing Lines presents you with something new to consider about infrastructure.

Perhaps one of the most interesting and powerful pieces is a collaborative photography project containing works from all around the globe.  Viewed from a distance the collective shape is reminiscent of the way infrastructure fragments our landscape.  Up close, you can see that power lines have a universal quality that we all experience wherever we may live.   These little photographs pieced together, from centralize what the entire show is about.  Infrastructure, while it is something we can choose to ignore, is a necessary part of all of our lives.

After seeing this exhibit maybe you can change your focus when you look outside your window, even if it’s just for a second..  See the elegance in the industrial design that populates our landscape.

The Urban Arts Space is located at 50 West Town Street and open Tuesday through Saturday 11 am to 6 pm, with late hours on Thursday until 8 pm.  Tracing Lines  is curated by Aimee Sones and Jessica Larva and assisted by John Javins, and is on view through March 24th, 2012.