Public Land Gallery is excited to present "Soft Land," a smaller, more intimate iteration of work by the 2025 MFA cohort from UC Davis. Together, these artists reveal how re-visioning, re-framing, and re-imagining the overlooked allows us to access new, softer ways of seeing and feeling the world. “Tied by a sensibility and a shared attention to what lingers, each artist drifts through one or more of the following: fragmented histories, unstable landscapes, spiritual yearning, or infrastructural ruin. Their practices trace the flow of signs, bodies, and objects caught between worlds—whether cast off then reassembled, or buried then unearthed.” —Dart Magazine

Group photo of 2025 MFA cohort from UC Davis

"Soft Land" curator Cella Costanza at her MFA graduate exhibition at UC Davis

"Restless" Oil painting by Nicole Irene Anderson, 2024

Artist info:

Joel Murnan explores how monsters, as embodiments of collective fears, shape our understanding of the ecological world; they serve as both warnings and catalysts, calling us to act amid uncertainty.

Brenton Haslam, an Oakland-based photographer, obsessively documents American culture and landscapes, drawing attention to what we buy, lose, build, and neglect—urging us to care for the everyday as a reflection of this country’s potential.

Nicole Irene Anderson’s psychologically charged paintings and drawings offer ambiguous compositions that question notions of place.

Jamal Gunn Becker, working through fragmentation, engages with legibility and visibility to arrive at a more embodied perspective—interrogating both overt and subtle forms of messaging in order to uplift lesser-considered spaces.

Cella Costanza reimagines common objects such as tires, chairs, and flip-flops into speculative tools for storytelling, timekeeping, and transformation. Her work embraces contradiction and absurdity, embedding meaning into miscommunication and failed utility to produce devotional yet defiant artifacts.

Josephine Devanbu's Matal series is an ongoing body of work inspired by a ninth-century poem translated from Tamil, her father’s mother tongue. In the poem, a woman desperate to unite with God promises to build and ride a matal—a palm-leaf horse made and mounted by the lovelorn as a scandalous public platform from which to plead to their unrequited beloved.