the wet and the dry
Works by Bill Basquin, Kevin Corcoran, Anna Friz, & Whitney Vangrin
April 11 - June 27, 2026
Opening Reception April 11, from 6pm - 9pm
Performance by Whitney Vangrin at 7pm
the wet and the dry marks the first group exhibition in The Lab's three-year series the compost pile. The project challenges the way we think about boundaries—as membranes, as interfaces, as opportunities for collaboration—through four major works by Bay Area artists assessing correspondences between species, scale, microbes, the living and the dead, life and non-life. The exhibition takes its name from common advice about home composting, balancing wet (or green) nitrogen-rich matter with dry (or brown) carbon-containing material. This balancing act creates optimal efficiency for chemical and organic processes to operate, ensuring that the decaying matter breaks down evenly and cleanly to create a rich soil web.
The compost pile has many agents, ranging from worms freeing up nutrients, to slower-moving mycelial networks, to microbes that digest decaying plant matter. In collaboration with these is the human, a balancer of materials and turner of heaps. These four works explore that balancing act. Bill Basquin's Scent Posts (For Farlow Mowat) draws on an anecdote in the naturalist Mowat's seminal book Never Cry Wolf, which detailed Mowat's experience marking his territory in an effort to keep predators out of his campsite. Whitney Vangrin's Sour Coil - Cycle One is a performance and immersive installation that merges the symbiotic traditions of fermentation with the efforts of kelp restoration to explore themes of fecundity, survival, and resilience. Kevin Corcoran's Ground Figures assembles field recordings of both sound and solar radiation from Mussel Rock, where coastal erosion is gradually causing a landfill to slip into the ocean. Finally, Anna Friz's Hole in the Wall with Pamela Rodriguez-Montero brings us into to the underworld through a portal cut into the side of the gallery wall.
This exhibition is in conversation with The Lab's related series of collaborative live programs in the 2025-26 season, particularly Space as an Instrument by Félicia Atkinson (September 2025), An Ecosexual Walking Tour In Search of the Elusive Boobie Bird with Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle in collaboration with Cushion Works (October 2025), and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste & Evicshen in collaboration with The Wattis Institute (February 2026). As Donna Haraway writes in the ubiquitously cited Staying with the Trouble: "[We] require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles."
the wet and the dry is the first exhibition in The Lab's new front space for long-term projects. This new space, refinished and outfitted as part of our Expanding the Edge campaign, will anchor our exhibition and residency program for the coming years, allowing artists the freedom and flexibility to envision long-term installations at The Lab that run concurrently with our active schedule of live performances and programming.
The Lab’s programming from 2025-28 uses the compost pile as a model to think with. The compost pile as a mechanism and site necessitates a diversity of roles and processes—human and non-human, living and non-living—and its success hinges on mutual interdependence. The first season of programming, titled the wet and the dry (2025-26) for the (de)compositional makeup of organic materials in healthy compost, explores the broad themes of ecological and interspecies collaboration and exchange through a vital materialism. In following years, we will trace this line of inquiry through an exploration of archival renewal and regeneration titled turning the heap (2026-27) and an envisioning of new, collaborative models for arts ecosystems in the mycelial web (2027-28).
Thank you to Teiger Foundation for their support of this project through their special initiatives grantmaking.
