From a wheelchair covered in nails, tricked out with large, inflated tires to a full-size car frame covered in license plates, “Vehicle as Art and Art as Vehicle,” the Night Gallery’s newest exhibit, pushes boundaries for what vehicles can be.

Jim White, the exhibit’s curator, said the artwork focuses largely on identity.

“You see artists who use vehicles to express the identity of the people who own them,” he said. “The vehicle you use to travel in becomes the vehicle you use to express yourself. Our identity gets tied up in the objects around us.”

Graduate sculpture student Kris Waid-Jones was invited to display his work in the gallery, located at Tempe Marketplace.

His piece “Fine Line,” made from two fixed-gear bikes joined at the front wheel and facing each other, harbors an abstract connection, he said.

“Conceptually, the work is about conflict resolution or inability to resolve,” he said. “[It was] born out of frustration over the political process.”

The two bikes illustrate opposition both functionally and metaphorically. Facing one another, if two people attempted to ride the bikes, each would block the other. Even if both tried to pedal the same direction, one would end up applying the breaks.

Waid-Jones said the exhibit’s location also adds to the uniqueness of the experience. He said the Night Gallery exposes a much broader population base to artwork than a traditional gallery, bringing more than 700 people to the exhibit’s opening night — numbers Waid-Jones said will benefit both viewers and artists.

The Night Gallery represents a collaborative effort between the Herberger College of Arts and the community.

A permanent exhibit, located behind the “Vehicle as Art and Art as Vehicle,” showcases work from ASU graduate students, faculty and alumni.

Joe Baker, director of community engagement in the Herberger College, said the idea to place a gallery in the middle of a shopping mall started at a lunch meeting. While talking to Summer Katzenbach, director of Vestar Development Corporation, the company behind Tempe Marketplace’s construction, the two discussed the ways they could unite the community and art. The Night Gallery is the brainchild of their vision.

Baker said the gallery has been a great success, bringing in 300 to 500 people per night. He said the diverse and intergenerational audience reached at the mall location represents a good cross section of society that would not see the gallery otherwise.

“It’s really a guerilla-style approach,” Baker said. “It brings together our faculty and alumni in a public space and brings art to the public.”

Reach the reporter at channing.turner@asu.edu.