Lexica

Southern Exposure is thrilled to present _Lexica_, a group exhibition exploring the construction of meaning through materiality, put together in collaboration with The Space Program San Francisco. Curated by Southern Exposure's Assistant Director Emma Rosenbaum, _Lexica_ brings together new work by artists Kristin Bauer, Danielle Lawrence, Brody Reiman, and Henna Vainio, whose practices span silk screen, digital flip books, ceramics, and assemblage sculpture. _Lexica_ opens with an Opening Reception on Saturday, August 15, 2026 at 6 pm and remains on view through September 12, 2026. This exhibition marks a new partnership between Southern Exposure and The Space Program San Francisco, underscoring a shared commitment to supporting emerging artists and strengthening San Francisco's artist-run ecosystem. Each participating artist was selected through The Space Program's residency, where they were provided with studio space, mentorship, tools, and resources to expand their artistic practice. But ultimately, what unites these four artists is their engagement with the language of materials and the politics of meaning-making. Each, in their own way, asks how form carries significance—how a repeated word becomes a sculptural knot; how a gestural mark made with a kitchen utensil becomes a feminist archive; how sampled text migrates across print, code, and performance without ever settling into a fixed message; how cast bronze and wilted flowers hold stories that resist resolution. Across mediums, _Lexica_ proposes that materials do not only illustrate ideas but actively construct, distort, and unmake them. That the act of making is itself a form of language, always partial, always charged. For _Lexica_, Bauer presents Flipbook Mixtapes, a body of work that treats language itself as a found material, something to be sampled, layered, and remixed. Beginning with a self-assembled "dataset" drawn from her personal bookshelf (Dylan, Deleuze, Octavio Paz, Neil deGrasse Tyson), she generates poems by collecting rapid-fire phrases in a notebook, then produces three versions of each: the source material as collected, a B-side in which lines are reordered, and a remix that reworks the whole from scratch. These poems act as a projected adaptation calibrated against Bauer's own documented hormone levels and real-time weather data, introducing a rhythm drawn from embodied biological experience, collapsing the distance between internal and external systems of meaning. Lawrence's contribution to _Lexica_ enters into conversation with Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), taking its gestural alphabet of kitchen tools—forks, hamburger presses, utensils of everyday care—and translating it into silkscreen on canvas, silk, and organza. Where Rosler enacted each gesture with mounting agitation, Lawrence repeats and multiplies them across surfaces, scales, and compositional arrangements, producing marks that accumulate into a visual catalogue of labor that is typically rendered invisible. Sewn together into large-scale compositions, they propose care, repair, and the rhythms of domestic life as both subject and formal structure. Reiman presents sculpture and installation rooted in her ongoing investigation of material memory and perceptual instability. Working with found and cast material, she draws on objects that carry histories she did not author, matter that arrives already freighted with meaning. Her practice at The Space Program centered on casting in bronze, and the works in this exhibition extend that inquiry into the relationship between mimicry and collapse: the moment when a familiar material begins to behave in unexpected ways, and in doing so, reveals the assumptions embedded in our reading of it. Vainio presents ceramic word stacks and woven forms that transform language into fragile, interdependent structures. Words such as "No" and "Why" are repeated and stacked until they tangle into dense knots where meaning becomes unstable. Working in English, not her first language, Vainio is particularly attuned to the contradictions and double meanings the language conceals. Her ceramic forms, which dry quickly and demand precision, mirror this condition exactly, holding unstable language together just long enough to make it say something. The Space Program San Francisco is an artists' residency providing artists across a range of disciplines with the space, tools, and time to create. Located in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, the Space Program facility includes 4,000 square feet of shared studio space where residents have access to a recording studio, industrial sewing machines, ceramics tools and a kiln, screen printing facilities, a wood shop, and a metal shop on site along with off-site fabrication services. To date, the Space Program has supported over 70 artists in the creation of original works across a range of disciplines including painting, sculpture, textiles, sound and print as well as a mural-in-residence program leveraging the south side of the facility's exterior. The Space Program is operated by founders Jacob Pritzker and Jud Bergeron with support from Isaac Pritzker, Emily Lakin, and Ben Venom.