Featuring “crazy experiments, doomed plans and quixotic dreams,” the artwork within “This Will Never Work,” this year’s edition of Southern Exposure’s annual entry-fee-free juried exhibition and screening of Northern California artists, were perhaps never meant to be seen. Blind-juried by Corrina Peipon, Assistant Curator at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum, and Mary Magsamen curator at Aurora Picture Show  in Texas, the group show includes artists from a wide assortment of backgrounds and career levels. Within such a broad-range prompt, artists and audiences alike may be faced with questions about the purpose of art within exhibitions, and whether a failure can be reinterpreted as a success, or indeed what a failed artwork looks like, and how exactly artistic intention plays a role in it falling short. Many artists ruminated on the role of struggle itself in the artistic process, like Noah Ptolemy’s Cost of Living, and that obscure area between success and failure, experimentation, as illustrated in Erik Parra’s collage work, Experiment Arc. Within the gallery’s ambiance of failure, however, there was still plenty of humor in the group show: from Gabriel Edwards’ appropriation of the audiobook, How to Be Funny to James Sinclair’s Proposed Martian Installation. 

“This Will Never Work,” 22nd Annual Juried Showwill be on view at Southern Exposure, 3030 20th Street, through December 14