I see every wave @ Berkeley Art Center
The Berkeley Art Center is thrilled to present their fall exhibition: I see every wave, a group exhibition curated by Aay Preston-Myint, featuring artists Joshua Moreno, Annie Albagli, and Ruby T. This exhibition includes a new site-responsive commission, immersive video, and mixed-media drawings and paintings, which use a range of ecological metaphors to explore themes of attentiveness, care, wetness and flow. On view September 12–November 22, 2026, and open Thursday through Sunday from 12 PM to 5 PM at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut Street, in Live Oak Park.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Once while looking out over the ancient, loping sand dunes lining the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan, I took out an old Polaroid camera to snap a picture of the horizon. Save for the pleasure of the company with me, it was not an extraordinary day, or even an extraordinary view, though it was, and felt, beautiful. With or without event, the dunes are a beautiful place scarred by ice and lapped by sun. As I released the shutter, my friend asked me: “When you look out at the water, do you just see...water? Or do you see every wave?” She asked me this as a person who just sees “water,” yet knows that the water is composed of individual waves, even if she does not immediately perceive it. This may have had something to do with them being a songwriter. As if she knew the waves would come later, fleshing out and individuating anew, once the image was retrieved and processed into language and memory and sound. I looked out at the hundreds or thousands of star-filtered points bouncing off the murky gray slate of the lake, the sun glinting hotly from its late afternoon station. We watched them again, emerging in blurry, warm-toned miniature on the square of film in my hand. I made a sing-song gesture to the water, indicating my failure to count the actual number. “I see every wave,” I said simply in reply. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she answered, turning down the dune in satisfaction.
"I see every wave" is an exhibition about mindfulness, close reading, caring gesture, and the importance of noticing the play of light and surface across our surroundings in nature.
"I see every wave" takes delightful advantage of the Berkeley Art Center’s unique architecture and site to explore this theme, including its dark, cavernous interior, the sun-dappled park outside, and the rushing cut of the creek below.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Joshua Moreno uses tracing, collecting, stacking, and other repetitive gestures to track time, map activity, and follow the movement of low and high phenomena ranging from sunlight to human detritus. His commissioned work, Everything Falls Eventually, is a site-responsive activation of the light and material that fall and flow across the surfaces of Live Oak Park. https://www.joshuamoreno.com
Annie Albagli’s multimedia video installations use the grandeur of landscape and the immediacy of raw material to talk about nature's role in human healing, and vice versa. Albagli will display new sculpture and video installations, including a water feature and a collaboration with musician Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), in the center of the BAC gallery. http://anniealbagli.com
Ruby T.’s hypnotic, lyrical, and chromatically intense drawings, paintings, and altars use marbled paper, textiles, and piecework to describe a range of affects from political emotion to sexual delirium. T’s work offers a tactile and poetic anchor for the themes of the show with its intensive mark-making and reverence for wetness. http://www.rubyt.net
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Aay Preston-Myint is an artist, publisher, curator, and educator working in the San Francisco Bay Area, after several years building a career and community in Chicago, Illinois. Their practice employs both visual and collaborative strategies to investigate memory and kinship, often within the specific context of queer community and history. Through curation, their research centers queer and BIPOC artistic production, poetics, and ecology.
Preston-Myint is a co-founder and organizer of several cooperative efforts, including No Coast, an artist partnership that prints and distributes affordable contemporary artwork, the Chicago Art Book Fair, and Chances Dances, a nightlife collective that showcased the work of queer and trans artists in Chicago. They currently support Bay Area artist communities through Southern Exposure's Curatorial Council, the Board of Directors at Small Press Traffic, a seedbed for poets who push boundaries in the arts, and their work as Operations Director of Vital Arts, an organization providing tools and resources for artists facing the Bay Area’s housing crisis.