Pilar Herrera Land

The space behind my eyes

April 18 — May 30, 2025

Reception: Friday, April 18, 6–8PM

San Francisco: 349 Geary Street

Olympia is pleased to announce Pilar Herrera Land, the space behind my eyes, opening Friday, April 18th in San Francisco. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition, and first exhibition with the gallery. 

Pilar Herrera Land is a painter based in Northern California. Her primary medium is watercolor which pushes and pulls time, drying as it pleases and slipping into its surrounding color planes. This phenomena both engages with and performs as her interest in reclaiming and subverting architectures of control. Government buildings, civic infrastructure, public school systems, and scripted ways of moving through and relating to the world are illustrated instead as spaces of play, imagination, and dreaming. In psychic demolition, the structures she paints, like in Flying Saucer and Basketball Court are frames of domineering concrete forms that break down into dreamscapes, relationships, epic quests of exploration, and a kind of queered romancing of the world. Discoveries are taking place, recycling each scene as one of almost alien possibility and excitement.

Herrera Land is also a teacher for the Oakland Unified School District and some of these recent works reflect on observations she has made about how the metaphysical spaces of learning, childhood, and friendship can reprise these settings which so often turn to control in the margins: buildings we seldom notice but pass through everyday, that sustain the humdrum banal melodrama of a life lived in static, disenchanted realism. The writer and critic Jack Halberstam has termed the “aesthetics of collapse” to describe the processes of world-building that happen in abandoned parts of urban life which exist alongside, and even under the cover of, architectures more dominant and visible. Through her layered story-telling, Herrera Land engages in the aesthetics of collapse critical to the current moment as a dedication to and reminder that infrastructure is an always-happening unraveling. It is a constant push and pull of rebuilding, reconstructing itself in real time. Like scribbled thoughts and a watery red outside of the picture, that turn a small pool of blue not quite set to its paper, an accidental murky violet, the more quiet dreaming happening under the cover of these forgotten architectural giants and failed promises of capitalism, seed regeneration and a deeper understanding of how we live with others. 

The title of the exhibition comes from a piece of the artist’s writing that describes a sensation which appears in the body in the presence of loved ones. When feeling loved, safe, and understood, she recognizes and locates this state “in the space behind her eyes.” The process of her work is intertwined with those she loves and moments where she identifies herself experiencing this feeling are often the seedlings for the more fantastical elements of her paintings. The space behind my eyes could also more broadly refer to what happens when one’s eyes are closed in dreaming. Equating the two, the works suggest that true friendship is like a dream. It bends and subverts reality. It can dissolve the formalities of living by helping us remain youthful, abetting each other’s imaginations in what the world might be like, and how we might want to see it continue to revolve around us. 

Pilar Herrera Land (b. 1996, Chicago, IL) is a painter based in Northern California, and currently a substitute teacher for the Oakland Unified School District. Her meandering practice centers play, joy, and a dedication to movement and reinvention within built spaces. She received her BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara and has shown work in exhibitions in New York (NY), Santa Barbara (CA), and San Francisco (CA). 

Emily Small is an artist and writer based in San Francisco, California. She is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study program (2023), and partner at Climate Control/Being in life without wanting the world/Fear.