Gritty, captivating cityscape is artist Matt Haffner’s focus

Bottom line: An Atlanta artist fixated on the urban tableau goes in some promising new directions in his latest solo show.

Artist Matt Haffner has always had a thing for gritty city life. The guy never met a pawn shop or an abandoned shopping cart or a vintage car he didn’t like. Over a memorable art career in Atlanta, Haffner has carved out a singular role in the city as a kind of hipster Mark Twain casting a loving gaze on the funky urban tapestry.

The Kennesaw State University professor takes his subject matter — and his style — from the cityscape, incorporating the graffiti artist’s spray paint and the street artist’s graphic silhouettes into his work. Sneakers fashioned from cardboard hang from wires strung above the gallery and street signs are appropriated and fashioned into whimsical birds in a show that takes the city’s detritus as its inspiration.

The urban landscape wavers between appealing and mildly horrific in Haffner’s latest exhibition “The Old Gods and Their Crumbling City” at Whitescape Gallery, which incorporates some of the artist’s familiar touchstones including a graphic style often focused on those silhouette images and an abiding interest in marginal, skid row-type urban settings. But Haffner is also moving in some promising new directions, exploring a growing sculptural interest in taking his work off the wall: paper and metal cut-outs pop the denizens of his paintings out into our world in a satisfying way.

Your first indication all is not swell in “The Old Gods” are the hordes of larger than life size, apocalyptic cockroaches swarming on the walls and several paintings in the gallery. We all know the lore: these urban pests are capable of surviving even a nuclear attack. Recalling the ever present scarabs that connect us to the ancient Egyptians, Haffner features, in elegant individual silver frames, a quintet of nightmarishly stick-of-butter-sized bugs crafted from hand-cut paper. The five works, “Persistence,” “Tenacity,” “Determination,” “Resourcefulness,” and “Adaptability” speak to the reliability of vermin, come what may. The pieces also suggest an artist preserving artifacts of a civilization under glass, like specimens in a museum. But Haffner has too much love for this chaotic, ruined urban landscape to do anything that feels very dystopian in “The Old Gods.”

Next to those iconic postindustrial creepy crawlies, a trio of pit bull silhouettes on aluminum speak to another constant of city life, the hulking warrior dog with shades of the Cerebus of Greek and Roman mythology.

In a second gallery, instead of marauding insects, a swarm of Hitchcock-ian black metal crows made from aluminum street signs descend upon a wall-sized painting on plywood of a naked, reclining woman, “The Banshee and Her Conspiracy.” On facing walls Haffner features small works in spray paint on panel and rusted steel depicting a variety of urban tableaux: a homeless man pushing a shopping cart loaded with his earthly belongings; dogs tied up in back yards; crowded bus stops; train cars; water towers; a police helicopter whose spotlight searches for a suspect. These images are rendered in stark, graphic lines like international street signs. Haffner’s backdrops to those graphic black silhouettes are grids of spray paint shapes and splatters to inject a dose of color and dimension, though they often prove distracting and overworked. Haffner is at his best when he focuses in on the clean, spare semiotics of the street.