AUTOMAT COLLECTIVE       

Curating exhibitions that amplify emerging voices and foster experimental dialogue within the Philadelphia arts community.

AUTOMAT Collective is a Philadelphia-based curatorial collective that champions emerging artists through exhibitions, programming, and publications. Created by and for artists, its mission is to support the developing trajectories of emerging practitioners and to provide a space where artists and curators can undertake experimental projects that advance the dialogue of visual culture. In addition to its regular programming, AUTOMAT partners with other collectives and community organizations to expand its reach and impact.

My membership at AUTOMAT began in Summer of 2023. Since then I’ve curated four shows, three of which included interactive media, including projections, tactile objects, motion sensors, and Virtual Reality.

Among many other things. AUTOMAT is an excellent space for prototyping different forms of interactivity.

Refracted Viscera

Exhibited in May 2025, Refracted Viscera is a cross-disciplinary, immersive exhibition featuring the works of Eva Wu, Lauren Bradshaw, Theo Trotter, and Katie Hubbell, exploring the queer and femme sensual imagination through the lens of embodiment, materiality, and digital experimentation. Centering the question of how femme and queer bodies are depicted in a media landscape that rarely represents them authentically, Refracted Viscera offers a multisensory space where organic, abstract, and evocative visions of bodies emerge. Utilizing mediums such as Virtual Reality, animation, and sculpture, the artists create visceral, speculative worlds that resist the exploitative frameworks of mainstream sexual media. Femme and queer experiences, like a prism, are multifaceted, and this installation explores what is refracted within that prism.

Participating artists

Curatorial Statement

As I considered how to structure and develop this show, I began to wonder what kind of experience would be created by exhibiting distinct bodies of work that maintained conceptual links, in drastically different mediums. What happens when tactile sculptures share space with ephemeral digital projections? Can the tension between material and virtual open new neural pathways, inviting us to feel and perceive differently? In bringing together distinct mediums and sensibilities, does the installation become more than the sum of its parts—a space where boundaries blur and unexpected connections emerge?

The collaborative process behind Refractive Viscera was deeply integrated from conception to installation. Each artist worked closely with me and one another to shape a cohesive vision for the exhibition, as we visualized an environment steeped in subtle motions that felt like walking into a fish tank.

Texture played a particularly interesting role in this installation, as the soft fibrous sculptures of Lauren Bradshaw and Theo Trotter spoke the same language as the mossy trees, titled powderhorns, installed by Katie Hubbell. Bradshaw’s work also emphasizes historic embroidery and needlework traditions, which parallel the embellishments of Eva Wu’s “Red Light Green” banners, large scale fabric prints of stills from 3D animations. However, video projections by Hubbell, filmed in her home using macro videography techniques, feature soft, slippery, liquid textures; coconut oil and glitter, the trail of snails sliding across wet glass. There is an interesting friction created when these textures are shown side by side.

In addition to the immersive environment created by the projections of Katie Hubbell and Eva Wu, additional sensory mediums were activated to maximize interactivity. Hubbell embedded in the powderhorns a multi-channel soundscape reminiscent of ASMR to pull readers into a surreal narrative about becoming a banana slug. Within the larger environment of the installation, Wu created an altar that acted as a portal for viewers to enter a Virtual Reality experience titled “Miss Eva’s Girl World”, a vast utopic dreamscape encountering up to forty naked avatars dancing and gyrating together in erotic communion. VR is often not an experience present in the white cube gallery space, so offering this to our audience was refreshing and received high levels of engagement.

Each artist truly had such an interesting take on queerness and embodiment, and curating their work was a fascinating experience.

one + one = window

Inspired by the profound insight of her twin daughters- the notion that “one plus one equals window” - 

Morgan Thomas Shankweiler’s work engages with symbiosis and interconnection as potential systems through which to make art; in the studio, in haptic interaction and in collaboration with Curator Zoe McCarthy. Shankweiler’s labyrinthian painted tapestries serve as visual testaments to the transformative power of unexpected connections generated throughout the creative process.

At the heart of this exhibition lies the concept of "windows" - moments of organic uncertainty that emerge from seemingly organized systems throughout the art making process. These windows, akin to portals, transcend their constituent parts, offering glimpses into new shapes, rules, and forms. They represent the potential inherent in chaos, acting as bridges between different languages and modalities.

This show presents a myriad of works where elements and languages of consistent rules and behaviors converge to create windows. Each window serves as a reminder of the inherent potential of uncertainty, whether it be to connect, transform, or destroy. Windows, as both literal and metaphorical portals, beckon viewers to explore the interplay between order and chaos, structure and topology.

Shankweiler heavily utilizes play in her work, creating puzzles that visitors are invited to touch and rearrange to further understand the concepts at play. For this show, she created a site specific table of interactive tiles featuring a visual language of patterns that would create “windows” when arranged in certain combinations.

Participating artists

Curatorial Statement

Morgan Thomas Shankweiler’s work is rooted in the phrase “one plus one equals window,” introduced to her by her twin daughters as a playful schoolyard trick that transforms an equation into a pictorial portal. This notion of addition as transformation underpins her practice, where combining entities generates new meanings and possibilities beyond the sum of their parts. Fascinated by the overlap of games and social systems, Shankweiler creates pataphysical game structures and aleatoric visualizations in which rules, chance, and symbolic gestures interact to form relational webs. Her recent works explore dualities—order and disorder, organic and artificial, familiarity and illegibility—layered to produce visual windows and portals of perception, while her interactive “infinite” games position viewers as active participants in the creative process.

Collaboration and dialogue also shape the work, notably in our exchange as artist and curator. Animation can act as a form of narrative activation, so I created a series of digital systems, shaped by the same algorithms and rules that Shankweiler implements manually in her paintings and prints. As the system cycles through the random distribution of elements, when “windows” emerge, the whole system is activated by an interpretation of inspiration. Shankweiler and I worked closely back and forth, with the artwork largely influencing the animations, but in certain instances, the inverse occurred, and new works were born.

Present Tension

By allowing ourselves to explore the delicate interplay between presence and precarity, we can attune to the cycles of nature and feel the texture of the ghostly fabric that sways between realms. Presence challenges us to confront that from which we would rather turn away and reevaluate the connections that define us.

Present Tension brings together the work of Amira Pualwan, Emily Stroud, Isa Dray, Kayla Cantu, Morgan Thomas Shankweiler, Olivia Fredricks, Paige Morris, and Rebecca Ledbetter, curated through AUTOMAT Collective’s 2023 Open Call. Their work reflects on the fragility and complexity of our times, and the quest for presence in the face of discomfort.

Participating artists

  • Item description

  • Item description

  • Item description

  • Item description

  • Item description

  • Item description

  • Item description