August 12 - September 4, 2021
12:00 - 6:00 PM, Tuesday - Saturday 
Southern Exposure, 3030 20th Street

Opening Reception: 
Thursday, August 12, 4:00–6:00PM
RSVP via Calendly

Southern Exposure's Mission Voices Summer (MVS) is a FREE four-week intensive summer arts program for youth aged 14-21. Young artists learn to use the visual arts as a tool for expressing ideas, ambitions, and creativity. The four-week program culminates with a group exhibition featuring the work the youth artists have created throughout the program. This year’s summer Artists in Education Program (AIE) exhibition will also include art from our Youth Advisory Board, Mentorship program, and also works from artist educators who have been a part of AIE this past year. Come visit the exhibition August 12 through September 4 to see what has been created during this month-long residency and over the past year. 

Adapted introduction by Youth Artist Jessica Zhou from the Antidotes to Confusion zine:

Lossless compression is like time travel, the ideal of a clean, neat, return to a past cleaved and grafted back onto the present. A reflection of our finiteness, how change leaves its inevitable mark on the ongoing narrative of our lives. There is no former life for us to come back to when there’s been over a year of social distancing, isolating, and masking, when we have lost loved ones, time with loved ones.

After what will be over a year of compressing our lives to fit into smaller spaces with fewer people, I wonder what will happen when we remember how to expand, rejoining one another in public spaces and gatherings once again. There were the hours of screen time, cautious distance from strangers, walks around the neighborhood. Who did we become amid the countless video calls to see friends, family, coworkers, classmates? 

The closer you zoom in to images, the more distinct the individual pixels become. Which is to maybe say, the more distance we have, the more coherent or plausible the trace of something becomes. So what is to be done when we're trying to make sense of something while we’re still in the middle of it? How do we make sense of what seems to continuously change? In the space of something too close, too soon, what gives? 

Lossless compression occurs when a file can be compressed to a smaller size, then decompressed back to the original without a change to image quality. Lossy compression is irreversible; a hazy, pixelated memory of what was left behind. What remains is a clear-eyed shrinkage; a degradation; a pixelation. 

There are far more questions here than there are answers. Though life rarely doles out satisfying conclusions, and closure remains ever-elusive, we invite you to look to yourself and to one another for the answers within. Take a step back and reflect on the ways in which we’ve grown through cramped spaces, the ways we’ve grown through distance, how we found ways to be a present in the absence. We invite you to timestamp fleeting moments, to remember how it feels to be shoulder to shoulder, to imagine new possibilities in this space of pixelation. We’re looking forward to seeing you again, wherever we find each other next.

The Antidotes to Confusion Zine created by SoEx’s Youth Advisory Board and Mentorship programs will be available for sale at the gallery for $10 each.