Natural Order, Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips brings two distinct photographic practices into the same frame, with spiderwebs acting as both image and idea. On view from October 17 to November 29, 2026, the exhibition moves through coastal Northern California, where the natural world and the built environment remain tightly intertwined, often in ways that feel uneasy rather than harmonious.
Liu’s work draws on long walks through Golden Gate Park and nearby landscapes, where he records leaves, water, sky and other small shifts in the environment with close attention. Since arriving in San Francisco from Inner Mongolia in 2016, he has treated the city’s parks and shoreline as places where nature appears both cultivated and unstable. His monochrome photographs carry that duality well: calm on the surface, but alert to the fact that even an urban oasis is a made thing, shaped by human decisions and historical intrusion.
Phillips approaches the same subject from another angle. Her new series, Not a Cloud in the Sky, starts with digital images of clouds hovering above the windowless data centers behind cloud computing and AI infrastructure. She then translates those pictures into monoprints made outdoors from actual spiderwebs, linking virtual systems to the physical world they depend on. The gesture is quiet, but pointed. What looks immaterial still rests on labor, matter and the natural environment.
The shared motif of the web gives the exhibition its structure. It suggests beauty, but also entrapment; elegance, but also control. That tension runs through both artists’ work, whether in Liu’s meditative images of the coast or Phillips’ layered prints, where the language of technology meets the fragility of weather, dust and thread.
Natural Order treats nature not as escape but as evidence. It shows how the landscapes people move through, build on and depend upon remain full of pressure, history and contradiction.
Image: © Rachel Phillips
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