By Maggie Luy

What shifts when the ground beneath everyday life begins to move?

Infrastructure is usually what disappears first. In “Breakdown/Breakthrough: Art and Infrastructure,” it stayed exposed. The exhibition, on view at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art from Jan. 31 to May 9, made the systems beneath Southern California’s daily routines impossible to ignore. 

Originally set to close May 16, the exhibition ended early as the institution underwent a major relocation. It vacated its former Irvine gallery space on Von Karman Avenue and transitioned its main site to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa.

The two-part group exhibition brought together artists responding to the region’s built environment and the policies that shape how people move through it. From urban neglect in Los Angeles to the ecological and architectural weight of UC Irvine’s brutalist campus, the works traced how infrastructure holds, strains and sometimes fails the communities built around it. At the same time, they also point towards forms of care and resilience that emerge within those systems. 

Together, the exhibition highlighted multigenerational Mexican American artists examining how infrastructure and urban policy continue to disproportionately impact communities of color. 

“Because we are a master planned community, critical consideration of our built environment is part of much work created by artists who have worked or studied at our campus,” Curator, Dr. Michaela De Lacaze Mohrmann, said.

The exhibition opened with photographs from Ruben Ochoa’s ficus series (2007), shown alongside works by Carlos Almaraz and Pat Gomez from the museum’s permanent collection. 

The photographs, “Overlapped in the 90063” and “Slipping into the Darkness,” document ficus trees whose roots pushed through sidewalks across Los Angeles and surrounding areas. Originally planted for shade in postwar neighborhoods, the trees became markers of tension between urban planning and natural growth. 

Ochoa first began photographing them in the early 2000s while in graduate school, initially treating the images as studies for sketches and sculptures. Over time, the documentation became the work itself. 

“In that process, as I lay out the photos, I was contemplating how I was going to translate this into a sculptural form or an object,” Ochoa said. “I still didn’t have what I was going for. So I continued to research the work outside of grad school, and I finished. That’s when it hit me.” 

With 4×5 film camera, this allowed the images to retain detail when enlarged. Printed at roughly the size of sidewalk slabs and installed just above curb height, the works physically echoed the infrastructure they depicted. Rather than viewing the works at eye level, visitors were pulled downward.

“For a moment, visitors behave in a way that approaches the anxious mindfulness of residents who must regularly pay attention to their damaged and thus hazardous sidewalks,” Mohrmann said.

For the past three decades, Ochoa has examined the ways social and economic forces influence the spaces people move through and inhabit. Based in Los Angeles and an interdisciplinary artist, he also serves as an assistant professor of Sculpture and Spatial Studies at UC Santa Barbara.

The exhibition’s second section unfolded as a pop-up installation from April 13–18 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre plaza, presenting CLASS: C (2001), Ochoa’s transformation of a Chevy van into a mobile art gallery. The project featured works by UCI-affiliated artists, including Sean Duffy, Beatrice von Rague Schleyer and André Woodward, extending the exhibition beyond the museum into public space. 

At its center, CLASS: C functioned not as a traditional gallery, but as a mobile structure shaped by movement, access and constraint. The van operated as both a container and exhibition site, activated by the works installed within it.

“As an artist of color, I wasn’t going to wait around for museums and galleries to invite me to a show, and so I was interested in running the van and inviting artists that I knew were making interesting work,” Ochoa said. “Artists that were marginalized and, on the fringes, making compelling work and willing to take it to the public and at the same time not simplifying the conceptual aspects of their work.”

Inside the van, the installation included a small concrete cube containing a living ficus tree, cast in 2012 by Woodward and placed on the floor due to spatial constraints. Originally intended for wall installation, the work shifted in meaning within the confined interior of the vehicle, emphasizing the relationship between object and space.

The ficus sculpture took nearly ten years of experimentation and refinement, as Woodward worked through repeated failures to develop a concrete system capable of sustaining a living tree within a sealed structure. Over time, adjustments to the material’s regulation of moisture and heat produced a stable process that allowed the tree to continue living within the work for years.

“It became this thing where I actually built models of the tree that had plexiglass cut outs in the concrete boxes so I could monitor how the tree was doing inside the form. The longevity of the living tree was the goal,” Woodward said. “So a lot of that science, that experimentation, went into that design.”

While the UC Irvine Langson Museum prepares for its new permanent home, opening June 26 with “Staging California in Early Hollywood” and “Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden,” Mohrmann points to the exhibition’s broader message of collective vitality. 

“I hope visitors can feel empowered by the resilience, creativity, and generosity that courses through CLASS: C and so many of the other works,” Mohrmann said. “They are reminders of what we can achieve as a community when we recognize our interdependence and unite in the face of daunting challenges.”