AUTOMAT is pleased to present Counting Backwards From Ten, a two-person exhibition featuring new work by Soso Capaldi and Ollie Goss. In Counting Backwards From Ten, the artists interrogate their relationships to organized religion and property ownership, using puppeteering, pattern-making and video installation to imagine new, more equitable futures.

    Ollie Goss draws from the rich history of hand puppet theatre to create work that examines character tropes, access to public space, and policing. In the center of the gallery, a group of kinetic animal puppets are engaged in a juggling performance, with two animatronic cops peeking in and out of their surveillance towers, keeping an eye on the show. Their video installation is a play on a popular cartoon trope of a rabbit season, with the interchanging hands of the hunter and the hunted calling the power dynamics into question.

    Soso Capaldi’s connect-the-dot drawings are a nod to a popular childhood craft, and an attempt to trace their personal history through pattern-making and memory. Their drawings depict the architectural details of various ornate gates in their neighborhood, the stained-glass windows in their grandmother's former home, select renditions of Ollie’s puppetry, a vase hand-made by their parents, and a Congolese Nkisi spiritual object, among others. Spirituality shows up in Soso’s work as they parse through being a queer person navigating familial religious traumas. They are devoted to the act of repetition as a vehicle for processing their OCD diagnosis and surrounding themselves with protective creatures.

    With their playful world-building, weaving together memory and craft, Goss and Capaldi probe their relationships to traditional power dynamics and institutions, as Goss’s puppets scheme in plain sight and Capaldi surrenders to the process of creation.

    Join us Thursday, March 12th, from 6-9 pm for the reception of Counting Backwards From Ten at AUTOMAT Collective, 1400 N. American St., Philadelphia, PA. The exhibition will be on view from March 7, 2026 to March 28, 2026. Open gallery hours will be held Saturdays from 12-5pm.