Erratic Fields is an exhibition emerging from microhistories and territories of shifting political and social ecologies of the “Californias.” As part of the ongoing INSTE curatorial project The Sedimentary Effect, “Erratic Fields” is its second chapter, and the eponymous exhibition concludes five years of research, expeditions, conversations, and nature walks with artists, curators, scientists, and naturalists that evolved into context-based, long-term commissions with artists living in the area.

The project began as an exploration of how natural phenomena and sediments travel, migrate, and erode transborder landscapes while simultaneously informing life on the surface. Drawing on biographical, historical, and political narratives affected by the erratic condition of places across Baja California and Southern California, the works in this exhibition move beyond traditional presentations of nature. Instead, they foreground the psychological, societal, and political realms through which geology and ecology actively shape cultural imagination.

Throughout the exhibition, the border between Mexico and the United States is seen as a single, interconnected region where utopian and dystopian archetypes of nature coexist and collide. Driven by earthquakes, geysers, droughts, wildfires, cloud formations, deadly winds, bird migration, geologic anomalies, and dust, the works reveal how environmental forces are connected with economic, social, and political processes. Inspired by the butterfly effect—where the flap of a butterfly’s wings in one place can trigger a distant tornado—the exhibition examines how small events resonate across larger scales, shaping memory, myth, and idealized and unsettling relationships to place.

The first Conversations program in this chapter took shape as an expedition to San Quintin, Baja California, in 2021. Artists and curators interested in nature and ecology visited a natural reserve with oyster farms, dunes, and extinct volcanoes, as well as the first semi-nomadic settlements of the region. During the trip, they exchanged interests behind their practices. These conversations evolved into commissions with artists, and a second program, Walking in the Dust, which included a series of talks and an excursion to Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego. There, intricate histories of land, politics, and market economy emerged as crucial to understanding other conditional layers of geology, agriculture, and landscape. Both experiences informed commissions for artists Alex Bazán, Johnnie Chatman, Lael Corbin, Archivo Familiar del Río Colorado, and Leslie García, while also prompting a retrospective engagement with INSITE’s earlier projects by seminal artists whose residencies were similarly shaped by close encounters with nature. These artists were invited to present new iterations of previous works or to develop entirely new projects, including Mark Dion, Anya Gallaccio, Allan McCollum, Allan Sekula, Gary Simmons, and Yukinori Yanagi.

Encompassing performance, sculpture, video, sound, photography, installation, and drawing, the works in this exhibition are presented throughout the gallery spaces structured as a metaphorical tracing of stratigraphic layers. Ultimately, Erratic Fields explores how ecology and natural phenomena influence utopian and aesthetic imagination among artists, travelers, and scientists—while also confronting the region’s irreversible and toxic landscapes, its unsettling beauty, and the volatile political and aesthetic phenomena that continuously alter life on the surface.