If you're pouring one out for your boys at tonight's happy hour, give pause for Kim Ward. It's Ward's Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran that has set aside Georgetown's former Staples store for some face melting art exhibits in the past few months (that small Post Secret thing, for example).

Wallsnatchers is the venue's most recent offering, a graffiti and street art installation that represents a stark contrast to the ink cartridge and paper shredder trompe l'oeil that was the beige office supply store. This is Borf's Staples—trade the Bic whiteout pen for the wide-tag shoe polish.

DCist was at the show's opening last Thursday to see six nationally known graffiti artists, curated by D.C.'s own Kelly Towles. The presentation is one of compacted anarchy, with Towles' pink roller painted gallery text mingling with the art itself. The tags and throwups here are articulate, huge, and careful in the same way World Bank protesters tossing bricks in to a Starbucks are 'careful.' If visitors feel put-off by surgically clean galleries, they will be plenty comfortable next to the open tag wall where you can make your own mess.

Towles is conscious that these artists are sponsored by a renter whose buildings he may have once tagged while roaming D.C. “How can you contain this stuff?” is something every visitor has to ask themselves as they enter this commercial space. You have to remind yourself that most of this work is not for sale and is destroyed when the show is gone, painted over when whatever Diesel-commissioned design is pasted up for their new Georgetown store. Faile's gigantic pop art murals will be gone as quick as they came in.

Here Florida-based Bask's tag “bask in your thought crime” is suggested to all of D.C. While you pay your renter's association for the tag cleanup on your 14th St. stoop, you can imagine the handlebar mustache you'd give the mayor in your own stenciled protest to botched stadium deals. Fi5e projects his vector images of motion tracked graffitists on to Florida's buildings at night—no paint involved— mark making without making a mark. Bask and Fi5e (curt names are choice when simultaneously running from the cops and tagging the metro escalator) are asking you to contradict yourself in the same way a Georgetown commercial space hosting graffiti artists contradicts itself.

Street art can't be safe. The risk and impermanence of something that may spread down the neighborhood or be gone over night gives it volatility and life. So when it's in a box it gasps. But we like things in boxes. Art in the Staples, Borf in the D street jail.

Correction: As noted below, Fi5e created the outside projections, not Tes One

Wallsnatchers is up at the former Georgetown Staples Center at at 3307 M St. NW through March 26th.