Lay of the Land, Root Division, San Francisco
Lay of the Land: Observations from an Immigrant Viewer
By: Shrey Purohit
Root Division’s Lay of the Land, co-curated by Naomi Alessandra Schultz, Julianna Heller, and Eleanor Scholz O’Leary, brings together 14 Bay Area artists who explore land, place, and how we see ourselves within them. Inspired by Jussi Parikka’s idea of “unfocused observing,” the show moves away from traditional, picturesque landscapes to pay attention to what is often ignored—small traces, contradictions, and what’s missing.
Even before you step inside, the location itself sets the tone. Root Division, and this show, Lay of the Land, sits on Mission Street, directly across from a massive federal building. It feels almost like an antithesis, pulling your focus back to the power structures that map and control land long before you encounter any art.
Inside, the show feels physically alive and diverse. There are videos and subtle water sounds, large sheets of fabric that spill onto the floor, sculptures that seem to carry their own mythologies, and tiny pinned fragments that ask you to come close. Many of these works use humble or discarded materials, gently unsettling our ideas of what holds value.
I’ve spent the last several weeks seeing this show again and again, because my studio is directly under Root Division’s gallery. As a newly accepted studio artist, I’ve become both an insider, part of this creative building—and still an outsider in many ways: an immigrant navigating layered homelands, standing on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land, watching this exhibition take shape literally above my head. That proximity has given me time to notice details visitors might miss, and to wrestle with my own questions of where I fit.
Floating Findings (Set Adrift, 2025) by Joshua Moreno
The first work that greets you is Floating Findings (Set Adrift, 2025) by Joshua Moreno. Bits of assorted found objects like plastic, tennis balls, styrofoam, lottery tickets, iPhone case, little trees fragrance, mini siccors, metal, cigarette butts, and an SFMTA parking ticket—collected on walks through SoMa, hang suspended at various heights. At first it feels delicate and spontaneous, but after multiple visits I started seeing how thoughtfully placed these scraps really are. I also questioned whether elevating these pieces asks us to reconsider them or simply makes them beautiful without asking why they exist. Still, there’s a fragile humanity here, a small meditation on how even discarded things belong to our shared environment.
Nearby, Jeremiah Barber’s work looks like a tree stump and branches rebuilt from plywood, bound together in a way that feels strained. From afar it seems almost natural, but up close you see it’s trying to be something it can’t fully return to. It holds a quiet sadness, a familiar longing to restore what’s already changed.
Emily Gui’s Bent Grass (2024) is a massive curtain of repeated lawn patterns, screen-printed on delicate tissue squares that spill onto the floor. It turns the idea of a suburban lawn, already a complicated symbol in California, into something ghostly and fragile. It speaks to how we engineer nature to fit our ideals, sometimes with devastating effects.
Naomi Alessandra Schultz gives compost bins the reverence of a classical painting in Still Life with Clippings and Waste Paper Bag (2023), inviting us to see everyday discard with new care. Her HACAN Fence 1 (2025) transforms plastic construction fencing into something almost tender, adorned with glass beads and small plant fragments. It breathes, with soft gradients moving from black through red to yellow, hinting that the borders we build aren’t as solid as we imagine.
Three stacked works by Catherine Wang McMahon tie China, India, Brazil, and California together using earth pigments on handmade Dongba paper, stretched with nails and grommets. They hold tension and care at once, trying to keep these disparate places in conversation. Her question, “Can we remember homelands we’ve never visited?”, lingers long after you leave.
Catherine Wang McMahon
Tricia Rainwater’s piece might be the most raw. A large black-and-white fabric print shows her standing in a wooded place, holding a small Ziploc bag. Placed on the wall next to it, dozens of tiny bags line the wall, each preserving something ordinary, wood shavings, a bracelet envelope, a poorly rolled joint, her mother’s graduation cap button, a photo of her uncle. Her small passport photo peers out from behind plastic, asking to be seen fully even in this careful dissection of a life.
Other artists—Alicia Escott, Jada Simone Haynes, Shao-Feng Hsu, Phil McGaughy, Eleanor Scholz O’Leary, Sun Park, Callan Porter-Romero, and Nicole Shaffer, add layers through video, collage, drawing, and sculptural assemblage, each circling around what it means to map memory, time, and fragile attachments to place.
A personal vantage: layered homelands, discomfort, and gentle philosophies
I’m writing this not just as a visitor or critic, but as someone who works right beneath these artworks every day, sharing hallways with artists whose studios smell faintly of wood and ink. I grew up in Mumbai and lived there until I was 20, so that city still feels like the core of who I am. But after seven years in San Francisco, I sometimes catch myself forgetting, or feeling pulled in ways I can’t fully trace. As an immigrant, the idea of homeland is complicated. It’s tied to places I left, places I never lived but am expected to claim, and this land I stand on now, full of histories that often go unspoken, or that people are punished for acknowledging at all.
What moves me about Lay of the Land is that it doesn’t try to fix any of these contradictions. It just makes room to look closely, sometimes with humor, sometimes with a delicate kind of reverence—at things we usually skip past. Most of the wall texts keep it simple: just the artist, title, materials and a quiet question. They trust viewers to bring their own tangled histories.
Tricia Rainwater’s installation could easily seem clinical, each Ziploc bag pinned up like evidence. But inside are intensely personal artifacts of family and daily life. Her passport photo, trapped behind plastic, is like a tiny plea to see the whole person, not just her fragmented archive. Catherine Wang McMahon’s question about remembering homelands we’ve never seen is painfully relevant. So much of immigrant and diasporic memory is partial, held together by stories, rituals, or objects that try to stand in for a place.
There’s also the bigger unease none of us can ignore: climate shifts, social fractures, the erosion of basic rights. Yet somehow this show is comforting. Maybe it’s because the artists don’t turn away from how messy it all is. They build from scraps, depict compost bins with a care that elevates them, try to patch trees back together out of plywood. They meet the world honestly, as layered and unresolved.
A closing thought and deep thanks
This exhibition doesn’t try to give us neat answers about land, the environment, or belonging. Instead, it offers small ways to see: a piece of hanging plastic, a delicate sheet printed with lawns, a joint saved in a bag. In a world that often feels splintered, there’s something profound about watching artists stay with what’s complicated. It makes me think that paying attention, really attending to contradiction and impermanence, might be one of the best ways we can be here, on this land, right now.
Lay of the Land is on view at Root Division through July 26, 2025. If you go, take your time. Stand close. Let your eyes follow the tiny details, the fragile edges. Sometimes that’s how we really learn the lay of the land, and maybe something deeper about ourselves.
Credit to Naomi Alessandra Schultz, Julianna Heller, and Eleanor Scholz O’Leary for curating a show that holds so much complexity with such thoughtful care, opening a space where insiders and outsiders alike can meet the world as it actually is.
