Sweet rides: These decks are made for admiring

Guys on skateboards. The pants loose. The verve strong. The moves tight.

If there's a soundtrack running through their heads as they fly up railings and down ramps it's punk, rock, hip-hop, metal. Something edgy and tough and with purpose. You can still get busted for skateboarding, after all.

Now comes a gallery show that salutes skateboard culture through contemporary graphics, rock photography, painting, sculpture and computer art. More than two dozen artists have contributed work to "Pushin' 5" at the BLVD. Gallery project which opens today.

The show launched in part by a local guy whose feet are planted on boards and in plenty of other things.

Nin Truong, 33, teaches in the landscape architecture and public-art departments at the University of Washington. He runs a Georgetown design studio, Luxe Riot. He helps oversee Goods, a clothing and skateboarding shop on Capitol Hill. He's part owner of the War Room, a Capitol Hill bar/club. And as his creative outlet he is art director of Manik Skateboards.

The company debuted in 2001 with a series of unconventional images silkscreened onto the $55 decks — the platforms that eventually become outfitted with "trucks" and wheels.

"We wanted to push the idea of the typical skateboard graphic," Truong says. So Truong, who grew up in Renton and South Seattle, embraced the city. The inaugural series included that old gas station Hat 'n' Boots, the Kalakala, the Pink Toe Truck.

Later series focused on animals, conservation, Jackson Street and Seattle's jazz history. Then there's the tribute to Aurora Avenue, say if Manik were a tourist office and Aurora was as a must-see destination. Butch's Gun Shop, lovely as a pink image, never looked so good.

The images, poised on the underside of a skateboard, the part that gets scraped and banged, don't last long. But like specialty Nikes, destined only for custom-built display cases in "sneakerhead" homes, Manik decks, in the eyes of some, are meant to be shown rather than used.

The decks currently line a wall at the "Pushin' 5" show. (Manik is pushing 5, in terms of its age. Get it?) The exhibit is also a follow-up to the "PUSH Project," which first merged skateboarding with the art world. Truong and curator Larry Reid, formerly of Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art, organized that show in 2003.

Over the years Manik has hosted various artists-in-residence programs. The most recent contributor is photographer Charles Peterson, whose lens has captured the iconic images of the city's grunge era. Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Mark Arm. These decks, and accompanying photographs, hang from a second gallery wall.

"Pushin' 5" is a retrospective of sorts — works by those who have traveled through the skateboarding company — as well as newer works culled from even more artists including Shawn Wolfe, Andrew Pommier, Maya Hayuk and Jesse Edwards. This time mini-skateboards, about the size of a bread loaf, were their points for visual departure. Ries Niemi, an industrial artist who tends to work on very large installations, turned his attention to something delicate and small: tiny skateboard T-shirts (still sporting a certain attitude) that "float" in a pair of multimedia works.

The "PUSH Project," Truong says, undeniably planted commerce in an art gallery. So this time the notion was to take it one step further and install an entire skateboard "shop" in the gallery. Thus the T-shirts on one side of the store, the decks on a back wall, and posters for various rock shows on the right. All that's missing: shoes.

Organizers toyed with an idea of setting up a skateboard ramp, painting it white and then "selling" whatever wheel marks got made.

Maybe next time.

Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com