Seattle City Light’s Portable Works Collection here displays new acquisitions from two dozen Northwest Emerging Artists, as the show is called. One large, standout work is Justin Beckman’s ominous triptych Friend or Foe: two giant coyotes staring at a kid holding a deer faun (this a still from The Yearling). You can’t tell if the cheerful kid is defending his pet or preparing to feed it to the hunters. In the forlorn street scenes of Scott Kolba, rendered as intaglio prints, Japanese monster parade floats crowd the sky next to abandoned overhead monorails—the latter being remnants from the 1974 World’s Fair held in Spokane. Below on the bricks, the fair’s promise of a bountiful future is contradicted by the urban poor and dispossessed. Similarly, Gabriel Brown’s photo collage is called Homeless Shopping Carts—found and photographed in varying degrees of disuse and abandonment. Filled with tarps or trash, broken or embedded in the ground, they’ve served their purpose to (unseen) transient users. They provided mobility for those in need, who then moved on—perhaps to better days, but more likely not. BRIAN MILLER

Mondays-Fridays, 5 a.m.-7 p.m. Starts: July 1. Continues through Sept. 29, 2009