ESCAPE -VELOCITY

Amy Cheng, X.S. Hou, Cecil Howell, Goldie Poblador

Curated by Dominika Tylcz

July, 31st – August, 29th, 2026

Opening reception July 31st, 6-9pm

Showcasing works by four artists creating in a range of mediums—Amy Cheng, X.S. Hou, Cecil Howell, and Goldie Poblador—ESCAPE -VELOCITY extends an open invitation to venture outside the bounds of anthropocentric worldviews. In the history of Western science, astronomy alongside physics played a pivotal role in defining a vision of the universe governed by immutable laws: the distant movements of the planets modeled “a perfectly regular world of changeless change.”^[1] Such clockwork representations of natural order suppressed what fell outside neat formulas—exceptions, chimeras, and irregularities, while the very ambition of ordering the universe fueled narratives of inevitable human exceptionalism. In contrast, the works in the exhibition reckon with disorderly ecologies and overloaded mindscapes reeling from anthropogenic shifts, attuned to randomness and aberration as a shortcut to the complexities of lived experience.

Working with and against science-informed world models, the artists in the exhibition use representational and diagrammatic tools to instantiate a vital web of interrelationships capacious enough to hold both order and entropy, technological extensions and immeasurable emergent phenomena, all the while dislodging the centrality of human perspective. But these works go beyond representation: they enmesh themselves in their field of study. Senses become conduits for cognitive and conceptual processes similarly to how astronomic models like the orrery manifested the idea of order and oriented the self in the now graspable universe. The works of Cheng, Hou, Howell, and Poblador transport us into ongoing cosmogonies, where the relationships between matter, symbol, and understanding are in constant flux, forming an open system of knowing and unknowing.

Conversant with quantum physics, molecular biology and Vedic philosophy, Amy Cheng’s paintings grapple with the fundamental questions of space and time through a meticulous strategy of mark accretion. The patterns of dots, lines and waves traverse multiple planes and scales to merge into vast, pulsating fields. The paintings’ plenitude opens up a space where binary oppositions dissolve and the individual is subsumed into a larger whole without ever going out of focus. In her quest to draw into appearance the entanglement of life and matter, Cheng doesn’t shy away from symbolism: a scattering of white flowers encodes the spectrum of organic intelligence pervading the planet.

The insistent liveliness of Cheng’s mark is echoed in the glass creations of Goldie Poblador, whose Rise of Medusa series attends to the aftermath of the 2023 disastrous oil spill in the Philippines’ Verde Island Passage, one of the most diverse marine habitats on the planet. Poblador’s work defies the concept of discrete individuals. Like an event, it unfolds across senses, space, time and bodies by weaving together glass sculptures, scent, luminescence and sound. Together, the ensemble forms a speculative habitat of interspecies survival, where the figure of the Monstrous Feminine, drawn from Filipino mythology, grafts herself onto the endangered invertebrates to overcome toxicity and extractive violence. Poblador’s Medusa responds to the destruction wrought by the technologies of ordering the world by limning a wondrous, regenerative disorder of hybrid species.

In Cecil Howell’s practice, the frameworks of landscape and architecture are transformed into conceptual tools for experiencing the collapse of temporal and physical scales, from the molecular to the planetary. Through heightening the ambiguity of shapes, patterns and textures, Howell’s installations uncover connections between seemingly distant entities: the geological past and the digital present,  or satellites and handheld devices. In doing so, her works open up a space for imagining the multitudinous planetary, life-organizing processes. For this exhibition, Howell incorporated into her installation elements found near the gallery, imprinting local specificity onto her sculptural study of panoramic relativity. Toggling between framing devices, haptic and visual modes of perception, and illumination and obscurity, the work tests the thought-shaping possibilities of architecture, infrastructure and landscape.

X.S. Hou’s encounters with matter are inflected in equal measure through scientific inquiry and Daoist philosophies. Materially-minded but medium agnostic, Hou stages interactions between debris, technological functions, home-grown polymers, and minute non-human life forms such as rust-eating bacteria or slime mold, through which they access impermanence and the bustling affairs of matter. Irreverent in their choice of material, Hou adopts forms that channel natural forces such as wind or growth, turning an aggregate of a car muffler and a disposable vape device into a meditation on planetary breathwork. Like other works on view, their techno-organic assemblages serve both as “model organisms”^[2] of interrelated resilience and a proposal for late-capitalist cosmotechnics—a lived (and liveable), practiced network of values, orders, relationships and customs that anchor and (re)orient the human subject in a more-than-human world.^[3]

In the shadow of ecological and moral crises of the twenty-first-century capitalism, the four artists featured in ESCAPE -VELOCITY experiment with alternative templates for understanding and acting in/with condensed scales and temporalities, layered cohabitations of biological life and technology, and comminglement of thought and matter. Their speculative modelwork responds to the limitations and intrinsic violence of the anthropocentric, post-Enlightenment thinking at the heart of the colonial and extractive projects, and envisions what it takes to break away from the conceptual limits of human exceptionalism. Singing together in different media, they eclipse the burnout horizons of the “dull copernican sun.”^[4]

^[1] Daston, Lorraine. Against Nature. MIT Press, 2019, p. 23.

^[2] A scientific term for a species studied in order to understand shared biological processes. In the case of Physarum Polycephalum, its knowledge-imparting capacity is due to the complex behaviors it exhibits despite its unicellular body.

^[3] Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. University of Minnesota Press, 2021, p. 41.

^[4] Olson, Charles. “The K.” Black Mountain Poems, ed. by Jonathan C. Creasy, New Directions, 2019, p. 6