Some art is pretty. Some art is beautiful, intricate and detailed. Some art took countless hours to perfect. Other art may not be so beautiful, elaborate or technically skillful but it has social content. It says something about society and culture and it makes you think. The current show at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Art Gallery, which opened on April 8 and runs through May 15, is just such an example of the latter. Titled “Transurbanic: Art Emotions and Some City Trances,” this is a collection of contemporary socially-inspired Mexican art brought to UCSD by Guillermo Santamaria, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MuCA) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, which is the largest public institution in Mexico dedicated to contemporary art. The art exhibited at this show is not high art from the Mexican tradition nor colorful peasant folk crafts, but instead works that Santamaria calls, “Another Mexican art which is a vexation to the status quo.” The art work here is of “urban, social, and street concern and the product of a struggle to organize art and move it outside its hegemonic impositions.” Santamaria said. “These pieces are a reflection of the paradoxical reality of contemporary life in a Mexican city. They reflect on the crisis, daily melodrama, and the broken condition of a treacherous, isolated, often violent, tragic, and generally out of control existence, which is at once pathetic, paranoid, and hilarious…although they are from Mexico, these art works may reflect on individual existence in any city through out the modern world. They show how the promise of modernity — that we would all live in clean, safe, and utopian cities has failed.” Some of the art pieces to look for at this exhibit include, a large back cardboard ceiling hanging structure, wooden panels leaning against a wall, a circular hairy wall sculpture, a photo collection of a man attempting suicide, a collection of UFO photos, a small sculpture of a frog canon, an Escher-like painting of a Mexican building, and a video of the mouths of missing Mexican children. The art at this exhibit is not “eye candy.” It requires you think and the challenge is to link the work to a better understanding of modern social conditions. Scott Malosh, a recent junior college transfer student to UCSD who attended the gallery opening said, “I am new to art galleries. I am not used to standing in front of a painting and trying to understand it. The works in this exhibit really challenge you to think and look beyond the piece to grasp the metaphor about society.” The gallery’s hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. On Saturday there is free parking on campus.