The shifting soil, the receding water, and the chirping birds—echoes of a landscape etched by the relentless passage of time—guide us through the small gallery where fragility becomes perceptible, taking up a sensory presence. This first work in the exhibition, Points of Confluence: In Between the Island and the Desert, is a sound collaboration between the artists in the two-person exhibition Muddy Terrains: Mariana Ramos Ortiz + Estephania González, featuring San Juan-based Mariana Ramos Ortiz and Phoenix-based Estephania González.

In this show at the Arizona State University Art Museum, the transient and delicate nature of our environment is made tangible as sand imprints dissolve, ceramic vessels bear the marks of the water they once held, and UV prints of a palm tree capture fleeting moments before they fade. This exhibition is a meditation on impermanence, where Ramos Ortiz and González offer a sensory dialogue between land and water, erosion and preservation. Through their works, we pause to witness the tension between presence and absence, between what remains and what is lost to the elements. The exhibition emerges as a compelling investigation into materiality, environmental precarity, and the layered histories embedded in landscapes.

Organized in collaboration with CALA Alliance (Celebración Artística de las Américas), Muddy Terrains brings together newly created works by Ramos Ortiz and González, where their artistic inquiries intersect in ways that challenge traditional landscape representation, shifting the conversation toward issues of resource scarcity, land sovereignty, and the human impact on fragile ecosystems. Curated by Alana Hernandez and Sade Moore with support from the Ford Foundation, the exhibition expands beyond the museum’s walls through its engagement with local activists and creatives who form the Community of Practice group, consisting of Vania Guevara, Pita Juarez, and Elizabeth Z. Pineda. Their involvement deepens the show’s commitment to issues such as water rights, cultural preservation, and the urgent realities of climate change. The exhibition does not simply present artworks as static objects but instead activates them and the visitors as points of dialogue and catalysts for broader socio-environmental discourse.

Between the two artists, Ramos Ortiz’s practice is rooted in the materiality of the earth, especially the physical manifestation of the earth as a concept—its soil, its textures, its resilience, and its vulnerability. Her UV-printed sand tiles, soil-based ink screen prints, and ephemeral stenciled earth compositions create a dynamic interplay between natural landscapes and human intervention. These works exist in a state of precarious balance, reinforcing the Caribbean’s history of ecological and colonial entanglements.

A particularly evocative work, Breezeblocks (Barricades), features ten tiles that resemble cement yet are made of compressed sand. Stacked in two rows like a short garden hedge, each tile carries a delicate imprint of a decorative breeze block mold. The edges, marked by impressions that are neither permanent nor fully legible, evoke the transient nature of both land and memory against the architectural impulses of the blocks. The contrast between the rigid grid of the tiles and the organic unpredictability of their deteriorating edges complicates notions of preservation and loss.

Another piece, Studies on the Fragmentation of Landscape (I–V), consists of five UV-printed sand tiles in a plain wooden frame displaying images of a palm tree. Using specially formulated inks cured by ultraviolet light, this technique produces high-quality prints while preserving the sand’s delicate texture, while each tile is cracked in its own unique pattern, accentuating its inherent fragility. The palm tree, a historical and aesthetic symbol in Puerto Rico, has been central to Ramos Ortiz’s work. Her interest spans its role as a protector against hurricane winds to its use in constructing a homogenized image of the Caribbean as a tourist paradise. By employing UV printing—a process that mimics the effects of time, exposure, and decay—Ramos Ortiz underscores how the land itself serves as an archive, bearing the traces of those who inhabit it. Her use of soil-based inks and natural pigments creates a form of image-making inseparable from place.

Sourced from specific sites, these materials carry histories of cultivation, displacement, and exploitation. They also offer a subtle yet subversive critique of the historically entrenched hierarchies in the academic European landscape through material erosion and a continuous refusal of both the sublime and picturesque. The result is a body of work that is both tactile and elusive—an unconventional response to Robert Smithson’s Non-Site concept. Smithson’s Non-Site works involve relocating raw materials from a specific location into a gallery setting, creating a conceptual tension between industrial containment and natural entropy. His approach reflects an industrial logic: ordering, categorizing, and abstracting the landscape into a controlled aesthetic. In contrast, Ramos Ortiz offers a counterpoint by embracing erosion and fragility as essential characteristics of place. Her installations underscore the impermanence and vulnerability of landscapes, shaped by both natural and political forces. Rather than displacing materials into a gallery space, she engages directly with the site itself, emphasizing its instability and continual transformation. Her work resists containment, foregrounding the precarious relationship between the environment and human intervention.

While Ramos Ortiz’s work examines land as a site of inscription, González turns to water as both subject and medium. Drawing on Aztec (Mexica) mythology, personal narrative, and contemporary environmental crises, her installations—including a video piece and ceramic vessels— explore the spiritual and ecological dimensions of water in the Sonoran Desert and beyond. One of the most striking pieces in the exhibition is The Essence of Chalchiuhtlicue: The Confluence, featuring two hundred sixty-two ceramic vessels, once filled with water, now holding sediment from dried-up Arizonan riverbeds. Evoking both ancient water storage practices and the contemporary depletion of water sources in the Southwest, the vessels offer cracked surfaces echoing the parched desert floor, which reinforces their material connection to environmental precarity. Arranged in a ritualistic formation resembling a topographical map, the vessels create two connected areas on the gallery floor—one encircles a black obsidian knife, the other surrounding nine cut sections of the artist’s braided hair. Both the hair and the knife were placed within the mapped vessel arrangement during a gallery performance. The title references ancient ritual practices honoring Chalchiuhtlicue, the Aztec goddess of water and fertility. Chalchiuhtlicue is often depicted wearing garments embellished with tassels, with streams of water flowing around her, a striking parallel to the braided hair. González incorporates Chalchiuhtlicue as a lens to discuss the spiritual and practical significance of water.

González’s video work, The Essence of Chalchiuhtlicue: The Sacrifice, delves deeper into the symbolic exploration of water, interweaving imagery of water rituals, personal storytelling, and archival footage of droughts and water rights protests. In one sequence, the artist, sitting on a large rock in the middle of a river, submerges strands of her hair into the water before continuing to brush it—a gesture that evokes both purification rituals and the profound connections between the bodily and environmental transformations. Hair, a recurring motif in González’s practice, becomes a material symbol of lineage, sacrificial offering, resilience, and the passage of time. More broadly, it functions as an archive of personal and collective histories, absorbing traces of the past much like the landscapes she engages with. This engagement with water is poetic and political. By invoking Chalchiuhtlicue, González frames her work within a lineage of Indigenous ecological knowledge that stands in stark contrast to the ongoing commodification of natural resources. Her works ask us to consider not only the necessity and materiality of water but also its role as a cultural and spiritual entity—all that is increasingly under threat.

The interplay between Ramos Ortiz’s and González’s practices is one of tension and resonance, like “muddy terrains.” Their works approach the impermanence of natural resources from distinct yet complementary perspectives—one through the solidity and fragility of sand and earth, and the other through the ephemerality and fluidity of water. However, both artists also share an investment in materiality as a means of storytelling. Along the edge of the gallery wall, the eroded surfaces of Ramos Ortiz’s stenciled soil spell out Cuerpo Múltiple (Multiple Body). In one room, her sand-based works face González’s cracked clay vessels, creating a visual dialogue about transformation and loss. These juxtapositions highlight the fragility of the materials themselves, mirroring the vulnerability of the environments they evoke. At times, their works challenge the viewer’s sense of navigation, raising the question: what if we accidentally step on Cuerpo Múltiple and break the “multiple bodies,” or kick a vessel? Ramos Ortiz’s prints seem on the verge of disintegration, while González’s vessels, though grounded, suggest an impending fracture. This precariousness is precisely the point. By resisting permanence, Muddy Terrains rejects the comfort of resolution, compelling us to confront the material and ecological uncertainties of our present moment.

Beyond their aesthetic concerns, Ramos Ortiz and González also interrogate the politics of materiality. What does it mean to work with soil from colonized lands? How does water—its presence or absence—shape narratives of migration, displacement, and survival? These questions linger throughout the exhibition, inviting viewers to consider their own relationships to land and water. The artists’ choices of materials—earth, sand, clay, hair, water—are not merely symbolic; they carry histories of extraction, labor, and resilience. Ramos Ortiz’s soil-based pigments, for example, recall the labor-intensive processes of Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean artisans, while González’s hair-themed video and ceramics installations draw from the tactile practices of Latinx communities. By foregrounding these materials, the artists disrupt traditional hierarchies of artistic value, positioning their works instead within a broader lineage of cultural preservation and environmental stewardship.

Muddy Terrains does more than document environmental fragility—it demands active engagement. The local activists and members of the Community of Practice took part in developing interpretive questions regarding the exhibition through conversations, performances, and events. The exhibition, therefore, roots itself in lived experiences, bridging the gap between artistic practice and social advocacy. The group’s experiences and input as water-rights activists, educators, and cultural workers add a crucial layer to the project, ensuring that the conversations sparked within the gallery resonate beyond its walls.

In all, Muddy Terrains offers a profound postcolonial reflection on the fragility and impermanence of landscape and its resilience. Ramos Ortiz and González remind us that the earth and its resources are not passive backdrops in art and life but active participants in our histories and futures. Their works urge us to look, to listen, and—most importantly—to act. The exhibition compels us to ask, in an era of accelerating climate crises, what will endure? And what will we choose to preserve?