The Parochial Segments presents the ongoing cinematic sequence of photographs Maya Mercer has been compiling of her neighbors in Northern California, where she exiled herself between 2012 and 2021. The children in Mercer’s images, slouching towards adolescence, are caught mid-chrysalis, abandoning their innocence and waking to a realization that home is not simply their refuge, but their fate. This was once “Indian country,” inhabited by Native Americans who roamed as they needed to; during colonization entire indigenous communities were attacked by gold prospectors and driven off their land. These children have not inherited the land but the fearful, ingrown mindset of those who were able to stay but could not quite sustain themselves and had nowhere else to go. Now they face a twenty-first-century version of rejection and isolation.

Refusing to simply document poverty, Mercer paints a fuller picture of the doomed, capturing their aloneness and inflecting her images with a seeming veil of blood: a persistent red saturation that augurs sickness and death without necessarily conjuring violence. This is the red of the sun yet its intensity signals a poisoned ecology as well as the catastrophic immobility of the next generation. These damned children no doubt want to survive the trials they are about to face—and living as close to the land as they do, they might just prove more resourceful than the rest of us. Ultimately, Mercer issues a crucial, empathetic warning: “Children, listen to me; hurry and get out of the burning house.”