February 10 - March 13, 2021
1:00 - 6:00 PM, Wednesday - Saturday 
Southern Exposure, 3030 20th Street
Viewable from the sidewalk on Alabama Street

February 10 through March 13, 2021, Southern Exposure will present new work by J Rivera Pansa in the entrance gallery, safely viewable outdoors from Alabama Street. Verseplot is a sculptural installation that draws on modalities from minimalism and textile traditions along with poetic texts, found photographs, and modular, ready-made components to playfully evoke a queering of the white cube space.

A mesh of metal rods and text fragments printed on faded lavender photographs is gracefully suspended in the window, reflecting sunlight. The pattern plays with the modernist trope of the grid as a diagram of power, as represented in technologies of infrastructure and control; but here the axes are flexed, queered, and draped, conjuring the body, chainmail, and bondage. The durability and flexibility of textiles is used as a metaphor to describe how networks and connection points can be models for thinking about communities and support systems. Malleable mesh structures can be understood as ways of enacting a type of resilience, acknowledging that components linked together are often stronger as a whole. A community is made strong both by connection – ”hand in hand” – and by fluidity, eluding the grasp of those who might control with categorization and hegemonic modalities of conformity and order. 

This entrance-gallery project is the second of three solo installations by local artists emerging from the challenges of the past year to focus on relationships of care and honoring the beauty in our encounters with strangers.