Brenton Haslam didn’t set out to create a “hierarchy of vision”—it emerged organically as the work developed. He began by photographing the ground, on scratched concrete, spilled drinks, found messages, then turned the gaze upward to fences, signage, bridges, and finally sky. In his studio, these images are meticulously arranged on a large blank wall, using strips of blue tape to mark out a grid, which wil be taken off during the show.

That flow from low, overlooked details to high, eye-capturing signs frames much of Brenton’s work. As an Oakland based artist, He documents the broken details of American life with an obsessive eye: crumbling infrastructure, decayed signage, residual pop-cultural, and neglected urban corners. His current project assembles hundreds of these images into a dense mosaic. Some are funny, others sting, many do both. When he zoomed in on the things people wouldn’t lay our eyes on twice, as an artist, he directed his gaze to the marginalized, where we recognize but never grow familiar with it.

These marginalized corners are woven together into a life we experience every day, but barely shout— people call it America. In Brenton’s work, it walks along crumbling freeways, flares from graffiti slogans, and flits between storefront signs. When flags he captured across different places and moments flutter above these photos, “America” seeps in from the edges as the absurdity of what we have, earn, and discard.

A patriotic desire to believe in the potential of this country intertwined with a deep frustration in Brenton’s eye. “I love this place,” he says. “But it breaks my heart.” His photos are warnings or invitations for people to notice or observe what’s falling apart and to care what it should be, and maybe through that attention, people can imagine, or make something better.