Curated by Vera Petukhova
Featuring: Isabel Beavers, Ina Chen, Nat Decker, Ellie Schmidt & Zeyneb Abes, Secret Server Club (Whisper, Nat Decker, Shanhuan Manton, Alice Yuan Zhang, Echo Duemig, Hal Roeser), Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, Sadia Quddus, and Devin Wilson.
A hybrid is never quite one thing or another. It carries traces of what came before, while acquiring characteristics that may become unfamiliar. Historically, hybrids have occupied an uneasy place in the human imagination, appearing as monsters, chimeras, or deviations from supposedly distinct and stable forms. Yet hybridity is hardly an exception to the natural order; life has always evolved through adaptation and encounters between organisms and their environments. What is changing is the extent to which technological systems participate in these processes, introducing new possibilities and dependencies that we are only beginning to understand.
How Hybrids Bond brings together artists working across sculpture, moving image, and experimental technologies to explore how these relationships develop through adaptation, imitation, and sometimes resistance. We often imagine hybrids as beings of the future, part human and part machine, but these relationships are already part of our lives.
The relationship between technology and human agency takes different forms across the exhibition. Secret Server Club’s collectively maintained computer network and Nat Decker’s sculptural energy system offer ways to operate outside centralized infrastructures, reconsidering who owns and controls the technologies we depend on. Sadia Quddus’s digitally reconstructed body, meanwhile, confronts the circulation of personal imagery through systems of surveillance and data collection, where our likenesses can acquire lives of their own. Ina Chen’s work looks further back, connecting contemporary computational tools with earlier traditions of astronomical observation and spiritual belief.
Questions of adaptation and embodiment emerge through Devin Wilson’s sculptures, which borrow from reptilian biology to imagine bodies capable of shedding and transformation. In Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou’s moving-image work, robotic animals leave the controlled conditions of the laboratory and enter natural environments, their vulnerability becoming as apparent as their capacity for imitation. These works reveal the uncertainties that arise when bodies encounter environments or conditions for which they were not originally designed.
The exhibition also considers the environments in which these relationships unfold. Through Southern California’s kelp forests and the altered ecology of the Los Angeles River watershed, Ellie Schmidt + Zeyneb Abes, and Isabel Beavers examine landscapes shaped by histories of development and ecological displacement. Their works approach technology as a means of observing and interpreting environments whose transformation is inseparable from human intervention.
How Hybrids Bond returns to the hybrid as a form that unsettles distinctions between species, bodies, and systems. What once appeared as an aberration from a fixed order becomes a way of understanding how life adapts and persists under unfamiliar conditions.
How Hybrids Bond is a collaboration with Angels Gate Cultural Center.
