As waters merge–swaying waves beckoning us closer

For as long as oceans have been a source of human sustenance, they’ve also been a source of inspiration. More recently, we have come to see oceans less as unlimited pantries than ecosystems whose autonomy is threatened by unsustainable political-economic extraction. This group exhibition, guest curated by Camille Georgeson-Usher with AGGV curatorial assistant Jazmine Andrew, focuses on the Pacific Ocean as “a guide for understanding the fundamental way the ocean influences our pleasure, joy, romance, love, movement and togetherness.”

As waters merge–swaying waves beckoning us closer features five artists–Violet Johnson, Carolina Caycedo, Léuli Eshrāghi, Alexa Hatanaka and Charles Campbell–whose respective ancestries trace a cup-shaped line from Northern California to Columbia to Samoa to Japan. Though all share a historic connection to the ocean and a penchant for mapping, charting and desire paths, each comes from a particular geocultural perspective, using different materials, compositional techniques and display strategies to convey their thoughts, feelings and experiences of a vast body of water generally known by its English name– the Pacific.

In Johnson’s photo-sculptural works, significant sites along the US West Coast are amplified based on personal and family histories. Caycedo’s large-scale mixed media on wood, Our Blue Corridors (2025), is a lushly illustrated map covering the entire range of the Pacific, including the continents that frame it. The sepia-toned banners in Eshrāghi’s afiafi (2023) are sparsely patterned with recurring shapes and short trilingual poems on the wall beyond them. Hatanaka’s On the Land (2019) is a hand-carved and hand-printed linocut on washi (Japanese paper) that has been starch-strengthened, sewn and gathered together from within or without, if not both.

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