Visual artist and educator Jean Shon’s “What Would I Not Give” opens October 11 from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Community Artists’ Collective. A poetry reading, delivered by poets Icess Fernandez, Reyes Ramirez and Anthony Sutton, will happen from 5 to 6 p.m.

Shon is a visual artist and educator working at the intersection of images, text, installation and photography. Her work lingers between the thresholds of legibility and illegibility, rupture and relation, and fact and fiction in order to sustain connection through loss. She often employs family and community artifacts as immediate vessels to the intimate and familiar.
Through subtle manipulation and regeneration, the work is pared down to its essence, asking us to redefine our relationships to a being, a space, a notion, a thing. She, in turn, is creating a new archive—a speculative one based upon her evolving relationship with the material. Rather than being reduced to static archival relics, her work opens up space to reconstruct memory in perpetuity.

As a second-generation daughter, designated memory keeper and family link—Shon is perpetually negotiating the burden of debt, guilt, and obligation with her kin. Her work is a testament to this struggle: piecing together fragments and residue in order to understand, honor and carry forward who and what came before us.

The exhibition continues through November 22, concluding with an artist talk from 2 to 5 p.m.