FRANK RATCHYE PROJECT SPACE
Magical / Realism
Curated by PJ Gubatina Policarpio
Exhibition Dates: July 12 - August 22, 2025
2nd Saturday Reception: July 12, 2025
The Frank Ratchye Project Space is pleased to present Magical / Realism, a group exhibition featuring Root Division Studio Artists: B. Colleen, Edy Cahueque, Itzél Rios-Ellis, Leticia Javier, and Wally A. Corona, curated by PJ Gubatina Policarpio. Blurring the boundaries between reality and the extraordinary, the works in this presentation integrate uncanny, dreamlike, and sometimes unsettling visions rooted in contemporary life. Informed by political anxieties and personal tragedies, these images reflect a flexible consciousness where the strange, supernatural, and surreal are used to examine social issues such as labor, migration, ecological crisis, power and agency. These artists turn to symbolism and fantasy not as a means to move away from the reality of everyday life but as a way to engage with it more fully and vividly.
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”
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 the 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
