negotiation
July 5th - August 1st

Gallery Hours on Saturdays 12pm - 5pm
and by appointment
Scheduled Events:
Follow IG @automat_collective for more details
Second Thursday Artist Reception: July 9th, 6-9pm
Crane Arts Building, Suite 105
Somatic Workshop: July 13th, 6pm @ Automat Collective
Hosted by Julia Taylor
Sliding scale $15-45
RSVP link in Automat Instagram bio
Collective Making Lab and Ambient Listening Room: July 23rd @ Automat Collective
Hosted by Kait O’Brien, with music by Lulu Xue
Recommended donation $10-45
Performance of Dusk Dog by Eilish Henderson: July 31st, 7pm
@ The Perch, 2309 Emerald St.
Sliding scale $15-25
Ticket link in Automat Instagram bio
Ecosomatics Workshop: August 1st @ Automat Collective
Hosted by Eilish Henderson
Sliding scale $30-45
RSVP link in Automat Instagram bio
The works in negotiation demonstrate a self-reflective capacity of art, capable of revealing and articulating quiet natures of the body. This mode of art parallels what is known in somatic studies as “threshold work,” a navigation from stasis into unfamiliar territory which, while risking discomfort, also presents an opportunity for growth. Threshold work dips into a moment of transformation, when we negotiate our sense of self with a body that exceeds us. These moments position the body as an expanse beyond will or intention, and show us that being situated—in dialogue with place—informs a dynamic sense of self. Somatic negotiations as part of an art practice reveal the oscillation between self-stability, and noticing where our boundaries merge (or collide) with other relational entities, i.e. externally prescribed sociocultural interfaces, or ecogeological forces shaping the embodied experience. Plainly, the art reminds us who we are, but equally challenges that very status.
Notably, the term somatic threshold in clinical use points to the moment when a body no longer shows signs of life. It suggests the creative transformation as a passage—perhaps through shedding or dying off—opening toward an emergence. What happens when we read these threshold negotiations, these creative transformations, by way of analysing the broader contextualization of the situated art? Using the conventions of a variety of disciplines, the artists exhibit fundamental tools to articulate the phenomenological individual, but read as metonymy—for the symbolic social body—also create bridges from the personal to the collective. Through analysis and discourse, the formless somatic potentials of the creative process permeate into networks of language to create meaning toward a more relational and interdependent understanding of the world.

Min Baek - Min Baek utilizes a diagrammatic approach to map the shifting boundaries of collective memory, the migrant experience, and bodily experience. Through a practice of "intimate vandalism," where she defaces and adorns, disrupts and restores, she subverts the rigid hierarchies of modernism to reclaim the informal as a site of profound resistance.
Megan Biddle - In Spirit Remains, Biddle uses the Risograph in an unconventional way to create one-of-a-kind monoprints. Layering photographs of collected shells, each print develops through the accumulation of translucent inks, producing a luminous depth. The shell functions as a stand-in for the body, a vessel left behind after the spirit has departed.
Marley Edelman - Driven by imagination as a deep well of inspiration, Edelman’s imagery emerges as poetic representations of fragmented feelings, much like tarot reveals an abyssal inner realm. Through natural patterns, symbolic imagery, and layered visual narratives, she examines themes of psychological transformation, the transition into womanhood, and the emotional mythology carried by female protagonists.
Lesley Finn - Finn’s interdisciplinary practice draws on archives, books, and esoteric systems of
knowledge, treating history as a living material open to reinterpretation through collage. In
Victorian Feelings, she brings Victorian portrait photographs into conversation with the color-
emotion theories of theosophy, creating works that imagine the hidden emotional lives
embedded within the material traces of the past.
Eilish Henderson - Henderson’s work Dusk Dog is a butoh solo that awakens the feral world of creatures in the wilderness. Survival, waiting, sleeping, hunting, birth, disease, suffering and death are opened as passages that signal realities that humans have distanced themselves from as we evolve into states that bypass brutality, hardship, and the most honest elements of existence on the earth. Eilish will also lead an Ecosomatics workshop, which approaches contact improvisation through a butoh lens.
Kiran Jandu - Kiran Jandu is an artist and academic working in social practice, performance, installation, and film. Utilizing philosophical and archival research, Kiran’s work addresses themes of intersectionality, mindfulness, and ecology.
Jaeeun Lee - Working across drawing, performance, sculpture, and animation, Lee’s practice is shaped by the violence and rupture that runs through personal, familial, and societal histories. She investigates the fragmentation of self that emerges from trauma, placing it in uncanny spaces where subject and object, inside and outside, presence and absence are reorganized.
Kait O’Brien - Kait O’Brien explores the complexity of class issues in America through the lens of daily life. The rhythms of our backroads, our relationships, and collective hobbies inform her work. An environmentalist with a background in public sector communications, Kait brings a drive for a better world to her creative work. Dancing and rollerskating keep her moving.
Julia Taylor - Julia Taylor aims to create a safe container for folks wanting to engage with the instinctual wilderness of the body for nervous system regulation, relief from symptoms, and intimacy with self and community. As part of negotiation, they will lead a Somatic Awareness Workshop to provide participants with skills to recognize and resolve chronic tensions held throughout the body.
Lulu Xue - Xue works through an ever-evolving model of collaboration, experimentation, and shared authorship that draws heavily from DIY ethos. In an era when digital mediation often replaces physical experience, it reasserts the value of real-time gathering and deep listening, allowing performance and art to exist as a living, breathing process outside institutional sanction. By transforming spaces into sites of collective introspection, these projects illuminate what is possible when we gather with intention, imagination, and care.