Organica: Flora to Fauna is a group exhibition featuring fourteen regional artists from Southern California. Continuing the Granger Art Program’s Border series, the exhibition explores liminal space as a site of transformation—where stillness, shadow, and illumination converge.
Set within a moody and immersive atmosphere, Organica renders the natural world as both mysterious and intimate. Tracing the porous boundary between plant, animal, and human life, the exhibition invites viewers into a space where forms drift between categories and systems of coexistence emerge. Here, “fauna” extends beyond the zoological to include the human animal itself. This exhibition situates humanity not apart from nature, but bound within the organic itself. Flora and fauna appear not as oppositional forces, but as interconnected expressions of a shared ecological existence shaped by mutual dependence, vulnerability, and adaptation.
Looking to the rhythms and intelligence of the natural world, the exhibition reflects on the ways life sustains itself through adaptation, interdependence, and renewal. Across ecosystems, survival operates not only as endurance, but as a creative force. The impulse to survive and adapt shapes growth, transformation, and continuity through cycles of darkness and light. In this framework, the human body and psyche become part of the same organic continuum as root systems, fungal networks, animal instinct, water worlds, and atmospheric change.
The works on view span painting, sculpture, installation, and mixed media, offering perspectives that move between observation and imagination. From classical depictions of animal forms to speculative and surreal botanical ecologies, the exhibition traces evolving ways artists interpret and reimagine nature. Human figures emerge alongside vegetal and animal forms not as dominant subjects, but as participants within broader living systems. Approaches ranging from photorealism to abstraction channel sensory and emotional experience into visual form, dissolving boundaries between the seen, the felt, and the imagined.
Throughout the exhibition, twilight states emerge as a recurring atmosphere: fertile undergrowth, nocturnal habitats, urban plant realities, and speculative ecosystems where darkness becomes depth rather than absence. Within these environments, a quiet sense of wonder unfolds, a reality rooted in coexistence, reflection, and an enduring connection to the natural world.
Extending the conceptual framework of the Granger and Guild Border series, Organica: Flora to Fauna approaches the border not as a division, but as a generative threshold. The hotel’s shared environments become experiential spaces where interior and exterior worlds converge, and where perception, environment, and imagination remain in continuous exchange. The exhibition also continues the program’s evolving dialogue with artists engaged in ecological and speculative inquiry, including the inaugural “art in residence” initiative with Max Hooper Schneider, the first emerging artist commissioned for UC San Diego’s Stuart Collection. Schneider’s practice, known for its explorations of future ecologies and evolving life systems, informs the broader curatorial context in which Organica is situated.
Balancing the dark and the luminous, Organica: Flora to Fauna embraces the full spectrum of ecological and emotional experience. The exhibition offers a contemplative space for reflection and discovery, where beauty reveals itself equally through shadow and illumination, and where the enduring vitality of the natural world quietly persists.
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