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.

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