by Cornelia Feye

August 26, 2025

This summer Bread & Salt Gallery in Barrio Logan is brimming with activity with a trifecta of unique exhibitions on view: Prometheus II in the main gallery, Lying Fallow in the Athenaeum Art Center (ACI), and Down with the Hierarchy! at Best Practice. If visiting three exhibitions exhausts you, there is also the Coffee Shop Provecho! nearby with a new outdoor space to provide caffeine and energy.

            Lying Fallow is the first solo exhibition by the talented young artist Helena Westra, a recent graduate from San Diego State University. She created a field of hand-gathered California grasses in an immersive space for reflection, rest, and interaction with nature.

            Westra first had the idea of Lying Fallow during a residency at Art Produce in 2023.

She wanted to bring the earth inside a gallery space in the tradition of Earth artist like Walter de Maria and Robert Long from the 1970s. Originally, she planned to grow the grasses herself in her backyard. But they didn’t grow. So, she went to Plan B, and collected the grasses from a large empty lot in her neighborhood by grabbing handfuls and cutting them. She transported the bushels inside contractor trash bags to the Athenaeum Art Center. There, she spread prepared adobe mud segments on the floor and planted the grasses bit by bit, sticking them into the wet mud.

            This repetitive, meditative process took a week to complete the field, which takes up almost the entire gallery. Friends and members of the art community came to help. Over their work, many casual conversations occurred, and Helena was glad that her initial plan hadn’t worked, because otherwise this organic social aspect would not have happened. They finished installing at 3 AM the night before the opening on August 9.

            Westra credits the Athenaeum being open to the idea of the installation and not expecting sales from the show, giving her the freedom to use the space according to her vision. “This is not a small object with a price tag on it, it is an immersive installation for community engagement and interaction. The meadow is an invitation for rest and quiet reflection.” Many visitors accept the invitation. They populate the field by walking inside, sitting on one of the three stools, taking pictures.

            I asked her why she chose the grasses and such a large, time-consuming, and labor-intensive work.

“It is magical to sit in grass, comforted and surrounded by nature,” she said. She has the desire and yearning to be close to nature and also explore her inner nature and wildness. Westra has memories of flattened grasses, where a deer lay. Lying Fallow invites visitors to enter the meadow, walk in it and rest on one of the three stools provided. “By walking we create lines in the meadow with our footprints. The meadow remembers.”.

            Lying Fallow straddles the end of summer and beginning of fall, and will include an equinox celebration on September 21. In California, the seasons are subtle, but yellow grasses mean the end of summer is near. A season of wintering approaches, which means rest. Westra feels a “bodily need for seasonal, cyclical living.”

            The show includes a large triptych entitled Anatomy of Summer, a form of self-portrait in the center panel, and quotes the letter to a young activist by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women who Run with the Wolves. “Do not lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times,” on the side panels. You can read it here.  A video documents the collecting and installing of the grasses.

            Finishing the installation felt to Helena like “dropping off a kid a summer camp”.  She handed it off to the visitors, to use it, enjoy it and immerse themselves in it.

Lying Fallow is on view until October 25, when a de-installation, or harvesting party is planned. Visitors are invited to take the grass, maybe make a wreath or a straw puppet out of them.

Floral nature motifs abound in DOWN WITH THE HIERARCHY! an installation by Jean Lowe, Abraham Razo (Rancholo) with Kim MacConnel in the Best Practice Gallery.

When you enter the Gallery, you may step on one. Lowe painted three Persian style carpets, depicting floral ornaments for this exhibition. One shows a decorative garden from a bird’s eye point of view. I experienced a moment of doubt, with my foot hovering in the air, not knowing whether I could step on the carpet, which is also an artwork. Other visitors didn’t even realize the carpets are painted and just walked on them without another thought. Lowe likes the invisible barrier visitors have to deal with, but it is totally permissible to step on the carpets.

Floral themes are everywhere not just in the Persian inspired carpet designs, but also in the vases on rococo inspired furniture in form of artificial flowers by Kim McConnell made from beach trash, in the decorative shapes of the rococo palace entryway of Schloss Nymphenburg by Munich, in the landscape painting based on the Imperial Valley Seeley Lake, a man-made lake near El Centro in the French Scenic wallpaper tradition, in a large graffiti painting on unstretched canvas by Rancholo, as well as in smaller works on wood and mirror. The three contemporary artists all use Rocaille images, curled, shell like motifs, characteristic for Rococo art and decoration.

I have followed, bought and admired Jean Lowe’s brilliant work for years. She has exhibited at the Whitney Museum in New York, and had acclaimed solo exhibitions at MCA San Diego and at the Laguna Art Museum. I wondered how she started collaborating with the young, third-generation Mexicali street artist Abraham Razo aka Rancholo.

Lowe told me she saw Rancholo’s work on Instagram and liked it. She bought a couple of small pieces. She messaged him and commissioned Rancholo to make work for this exhibition. Lowe created the cloud-like shapes in wood and mirror and brought them down to Mexicali. While she sat in a camping chair with a beer, Rancholo painted the shapes right there on the street, in addition to a large piece on canvas that is now tacked up at a wall in the gallery – a self-portrait, consisting of a face, tennis shoes and smiley faces.

One hour before opening at Bread & Salt, Rancholo tagged Lowe’s wall-size painting of the rococo entrance to Nymphenburg palace in Munich with two additional “popcorn” shapes. They reminded me of clouds, or sheep. Lowe said she likes “the tension between sweet and street.” I asked her how she felt when Rancholo sprayed right on top of her painting, and she admitted that it made her a bit uncomfortable, but she likes it when “art that makes her uncomfortable, because then she knows she is on to something new.”

The show is called Down with the Hierarchy, because it blurs differences between graffiti art, decorative art and so-called high art. Accessibility is the goal, and that includes many visitors walking through the gallery on top of the carpets from the coffee shop on their way to the outdoor garden. It closes end of August.

The third exhibition on view is Prometheus II in Bread & Salt’s Main Gallery. It provides a special behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the surreal sci-fi movie Prometheus II. It features sculpture, large-scale movie sets, and props in collaboration with ICE Gallery, whose space has been transformed into a movie theater for the 5-minute trailer of the film Prometheus II.

The artist Jason Sherry stated.

“Starting in 2016 as Bread & Salts Artist in Residence, I set out to indulge my interest in crafting sci-fi movie effects by hand with black paper for space and foam ball planets. I employed instinct and anti-instinct to form a stream of conscious narrative held together with hot glue and melted mozzarella. As an emotional reaction to the state of the world over the past nine years I chose to make every decision about crafting the next sequence in the narrative the worst possible. As emblematic of the time in which we live, planet pizza feels desperate and absurd. As the narrative propels toward green planet, anything is possible, as in a whole planet of chroma key green screen. Is it heaven or hell or the depository of human being-ness?”

The Exhibitions are on view until October 25, 2025

Bread & Salt Gallery, Best Practice Gallery, Athenaeum Art Center
1955 Julian Ave.
San Diego, CA 92113

Images: Photo credit of the artists or Cornelia Feye