Cheryl Derricotte: A Consideration of Trees @ re.riddle

Cheryl Derricotte's second solo exhibition, A Consideration of Trees, invites us to see San Francisco through its trees. Urban trees function as site-specific records of a city's environmental and infrastructural conditions, an alternative mapping system through which climate, planning, and maintenance become legible. Their growth bears the marks of heat, pollution, soil constraint, and species migration, encoding the social, political, and historical forces that organize land use.

Through photographic textiles and glass works, the exhibition proposes a cartography that extends beyond zoning, administrative boundaries, and the optimized flows of capital and information. Selecting one tree from each of the city's thirty-six neighborhoods, Derricotte assembles a portrait of San Francisco as a living network of adaptation, persistence, and kinship. Indigenous California species appear alongside Australian imports, including the contested eucalyptus, whilst Southern magnolias, displaced from their southeastern origins, flourish across the city. These trees trace patterns of dispersal and settlement: which species were moved, by whom, and to what end. They embody the friction between private and public land and expose the city's ongoing negotiation with ecological precarity.

Thirteen of the photographic textile works, annotated with latitude and longitude coordinates, position trees as points of orientation across the city. The coordinates anchor each image in the specificity of place while opening onto broader narratives of coexistence. The trees are relational organisms, bound to their neighbors through root systems and shared soil, exchanging nutrients, signaling stress, sustaining one another across difference.

They register the forces of geology, history, ecology, and power as structural, written into their very form. The eucalyptus carries its colonial introduction in the particular way it grows. The magnolia carries its southeastern origin into the specific weight of its presence on a San Francisco street. Each tree contains the historical and moral arc of its coming into being. A Consideration of Trees asks us to attend to that curvature and an ethic of living-with, in which adaptation and consideration unfold slowly, rootedly, and in shared time.