2nd Saturday June 2025

MAIN GALLERY

Lay of the Land
Curated by Julianna Heller, Eleanor Scholz O'Leary, and Naomi Alessandra Schultz

Exhibition Dates: June  11 - July 26, 2025

“Artistic practice...can benefit immeasurably from unfocusing; to train oneself to observe what appears out of sight so as to cultivate an understanding of the structural complexity and agency of our environment.”
—Jussi Parikka, “Cartographies of Environmental Arts”

Root Division is proud to present Lay of the Land co-curated by Julianna Heller, Eleanor Scholz O’Leary, and Naomi Alessandra Schultz

Canonical Western landscape art has historically been used as a political tool to define the “truth” of a place, a narrative to assert ownership and dominion. Yet environments in all their intricacies cannot neatly slot into a framework; they are as nuanced as the many human and non-human beings that engage with them. The lay of the land—the unique arrangement or characteristics of a place—contains a multitude of truths.

Lay of the Land is an exhibition of 14 Bay Area-based artists that underscores the complexity of making artwork about environment. Employing methods akin to Parikka’s idea of unfocused observing, each artist is attuned to the unseen: those aspects of landscape that are amorphous, absent, and/or fleeting. Within the show, macro and micro perspective shifts reveal both the expansive and singular in landscape. Works re-engage nature and place through personal histories; artists are visibly reinserted into the landscape to acknowledge their subjecthood and belonging. Discarded materials are embraced, transforming our understanding of agency and value in shared environments.

Together, the artists of Lay of the Land meet the world as they find it, facing complicated environmental themes with haptic curiosity, ingenuity, and (at times) playfulness. Exhibiting painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, textiles, installation, collage, and assemblage, Lay of the Land offers deeply personal and idiosyncratic ways of experiencing the many environments that exist in this place at this time.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Jeremiah Barber
Alicia Escott
Emily Gui
Jada Simone Haynes
Shao-Feng Hsu
Phil McGaughy
Joshua Moreno
Eleanor Scholz O’Leary
Sun Park
Callan Porter-Romero
Tricia Rainwater
Naomi Alessandra Schultz
Nicole Shaffer
Catherine Wang McMahon

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FRANK RATCHYE PROJECT SPACE

Jasper Wilde: Biological

Exhibition Dates: June 11 - July 5th, 2025

The Frank Ratchye Project Space is pleased to present Biological, a solo exhibition by Root Division Studio Artist Jasper Wilde. 

In this new and on-going body of work,  Wilde presents a series of stark, desolate landscapes that collapse the boundary between external terrain and internal experience. Varying in both media and degrees of abstraction, each painting feels less like a representation of place and more like a psychic topography: visual records of physical and emotional distance, battles for self-preservation, and the negotiation of familial estrangement. 

At the core of the exhibition is Wilde’s interrogation of the perceived rigidity of the “biological” and its weaponization—particularly against queer and trans people—as they reclaim the term as something inherently fluid, evolutionary, and emergent. Through this lens, Wilde’s works map a zone of transformation, a space between personal inquiry, political refusal, and imaginative possibilities within a world that often demands our silence and conformity.