“I see every wave,” a new site-specific group exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center, offers a method for stillness in a warming, roiling world. Curated by Aay Preston-Myint, it features the work of Joshua Moreno, Ruby T. and Annie Albagli. Each invites viewers to meditate upon the surrounding environment, one’s inner mind and our familial contexts.
The resulting method of contemplation is simple. If you find yourself attending to complex things—bodies of water, leaves, feelings, weather—try to hone in on each cresting incident while remaining present to the wider contexts that we hold in common.
Approaching the Art Center through Live Oak Park, one first walks over Moreno’s outdoor 2025 installation “Everything Falls Eventually” in which scattered, fallen leaves are outlined with the spray chalk used on construction sites. These outlines appear on the entry footpath to the art space and around the Art Center’s grounds. Different chalk colors are allocated to different trees. Wind, footfalls, rain and other elements disturb the pattern of leaves over the course of the show, while Moreno’s chalk tracings remain for a time, until they too will naturally disperse.
As a multimedia artist focused on the relationship between human and more-than-human systems, Moreno emphasizes the happenstance quality of the leaves, and the composition of his chalk outlines not only responds to the environment but further implicates the visitor’s participation. “Everything Falls Eventually” thus offers an initial methodology for marking, mapping and considering our changing environment.
Inside, the yurt-shaped exhibition space (designed by Robert W. Ratcliff in 1967), a larger semi-translucent screen hanging parallel to the entrance offers “mdbr mdbr,” a 2026 video projection by Albagli. It includes a lush close view of the lip of whitewater breaking over sand with an accompanying soundtrack by Brian Chase. The installation requires that viewers pass beyond the visual scrim of water to enter the rest of the space, marking a conceptual entry point.
Chicago-based artist Ruby T.’s framed and unframed works on marble patterned paper hang on the perimeter of the space. Their warm pinks, reds, whites, and blacks provide a background for each surface on which the artist adds inked drawings. Here too, Ruby T illustrates a method to attend to the fluid patterns of pigment, patterns that might otherwise seem abstract.
The pen and ink drawings, however, intervene upon and thus define the space, adding flying carpet-forms, raindrops, waves, faces and patterns that suggest improvisational engagement with the background’s emerging forms. Many of their titles reference water: “Mid Drip” (2019), “Underwater Flood” (2019), and “Altar for getting slammed so hard by a wave” (2021).
And a large work, 2023’s “Tapestry for Temple Spiraling,” draws on the fluid patterns of our inner lives and the desire to make meaning of consciousness, its patterns, and swerves of free will.
Culminating the show and providing constant acoustic accompaniment is the large fountain by Albagli, “This Long Line of Water; a Body of Water,” made of beeswax, plaster, wax, copper, ferns, postpartum hair and latex. A large green fern sits in a beeswax cradle. Three fine, steady arcs of water pour audibly from the large cradle into smaller, receiving cradles, also made of beeswax, and positioned around the fern. The smell of beeswax infuses the room. Wax shells decorate the stands of each upright cradle. It is unclear how the water returns from the cradles to the plant’s base; viewers sense its endless capacity to water the others, which surround it like smaller “children” at various heights.
A smaller screen positioned on the floor faces the large translucent projection by the door. Facing each other, the two screens establish a kind of dialectic. The screen on the floor, “This Long Line of Water,” also with a soundtrack by Chase, includes an astral image that the camera pans over until a central circle opens up with the pattern of light reflecting on water, abstract at first, then becoming clear as the circle expands. We see more water, recognize that the image is mirrored down the center, and once more, through a kind of birth of image, experience the water filling the screen, replacing the astral landscape. Albagli’s installation draws on themes of birth and intergenerational transmission, a transmission often as difficult to comprehend as the earth’s systems.
In a world where the sea of a worrisome future threatens to eclipse all else, “I see every wave” recalls methods to center oneself in the present, attending to the finer relations of one’s own position between the environment, the unconscious and intergenerational transmissions. The result is an optimistic engagement with the world, something direct, and born of human hands.
“I see every wave” continues through Nov. 22 at the Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., Berkeley. Visit https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/. Curator Aay Preston-Myint and the artists appear in a talk at 3 p.m. Oct. 10; RSVP here.