Amidst unflagging systems of control, we become acutely aware of our own personhood, compelled again and again to define ourselves anew. Disparate pockets of knowledge converge, caught between iterations of self, layered between internal and external impositions. The works in Unbound evade, highlight, and resist forms of capture. Exploring corporeality, surveillance, and ecology, the artists offer intimate, bodily understandings, where agential subjects break free from their formal containment. Responding to our current moment—in which media and constant observation breach the self as an internal state of being—Unbound suggests a release of our firmly held adherence to physicality, and avers divergent possibilities. Here, we transcend our own capture as subjects and claim an existence that resists parameters. With each symbolic or material iteration of self, we assert our bodies as new vessels of change, adaptation, and resistance.

Unbound brings together the work of Christen Baker, Mary Champagne, Izabela Cookson, Charles Jarboe, Sol Kim, Emily Loughlin, Noah McWilliams, Lena Ruth Schwartz, and Echo Xu, curated by AUTOMAT members Lexi Arrietta, Pilar Caruso, Jo Nakayama-Painter, and Dana Suleymanova through AUTOMAT Collective’s Annual Open Call.

Join us Thursday, December 11, from 6-9 pm for the reception of Unbound at AUTOMAT Collective, 1400 N. American St., Philadelphia, PA. The exhibition will be on view from December 6, 2025 through January 24, 2026. Gallery hours are Saturdays from 12-5pm, or by appointment.