Step through the doors of Southern Exposure and enter a dreamed-up world. This realm, complete with its own architecture, heraldry, and visions of the future, was created over the past month as part of the Mission Voices Summer program. High school students, youth leaders, and teaching artists gathered twice a week to build The Unreal World through multi-disciplinary, collaborative art projects. Dreams — of both slumber and the future — shape this festive and colorful exhibition of sculpture, collage, and textile work.
While the Mission Voices program operates based on workshops led by teaching artists, the students and their imaginations are at the forefront. This is especially the case with Hanging Flags, where varying interests manifest themselves as vibrant designs and declarations. In combination, the fifteen flags hanging from the rafters of the Southern Exposure gallery seem to celebrate a long run of athletic victories. One additional contribution, a floor piece by Julian Reyes titled Random Wolf, takes the idea of the flag as trophy a step further. Splayed out like a rug, his faux-fur hide is covered with googly eyes and felt shapes, speaking to a personal system of symbols and a universal sense of humor.
At the back of the gallery space hang Woven Dreams, three oversized dream catchers affixed to the walls. Made using scraps of cloth the students brought from home, the multicolored loops trail to the floor in ribbons of varying length, looking as if they could take flight at any moment. These pieces capture student artist Artisha Gardner’s enthusiasm for this year’s program, which she described as “everything coming together to make one big picture.”
Fittingly, pieces in the exhibition alternate between individual and group efforts. Territorial Journeys, a large-scale hand-painted map of San Francisco, features an anonymous network of pathways between the Mission Voices participants, their homes, and the central node of Southern Exposure. Dome Home is a continuation of this, providing a physical space for the intersection of those different lives and introducing the architectural philosophy of R. Buckminster Fuller into The Unreal World.