Before We Know What To Call It
August 7 - August 14, 2026
13 Grattan St, #402, Brooklyn, NY, 11206
Artists
Pin Yi Tu
Yuanlu (Victoria) Ma
Megan Ulrich
Lindsey Caputo
Cecilia McKinnon
Jaewon Jung
Molly Morin
Curator
Hantian Zhang
New York — A Space Gallery is pleased to present Before We Know What To Call It, a group exhibition curated by Hantian Zhang, featuring works by Lindsey Caputo, Jaewon Jung, Yuanlu (Victoria) Ma, Cecilia McKinnon, Molly Morin, Pin Yi T u, and Megan Ulrich.
A paradigm shift is easiest to recognize in retrospect. When old frameworks lose their authority but whatever replaces them remains uncertain, we find ourselves in an interval where questions, probing, and new ways of looking prevail.
Paradigm Shift: Before We Had a Name for It stays with that interval. Bringing together seven artists working across painting, sculpture, textiles, photography, video, and the artist book, the exhibition considers moments when familiar ways of seeing, knowing, and making no longer suffice. A mountain recognizable from afar dissolves into dirt, stones, trees, and fog as one approaches it. Forms resembling
stone reveal their precariousness. An emotional response once accepted as natural becomes recognizable as learned. Discarded commodities become raw material for another system of production.
These shifts occur at different scales, from perception and memory to ecological systems, technologies, social behavior, and artistic materials. Some works reveal instability; others turn toward forms and practices still in the process of becoming. What connects them is not a shared answer but an unsettled condition. Before We Had a Name for It asks us to stay with that moment, when certainty loosens and
other possibilities first become perceptible.
Lindsey Caputo, Let No One Sleep (2020)
Lindsey Caputo is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, sculpture, and performance. Her video Let No One Sleep inhabits the uncertain boundary between real and unreal, past and present, where familiar categories begin to lose their ability to organize experience.
Pin Yi Tu, There’s a light in that foggy distance place. (2022)
Pin Yi Tu works across photography, moving image, and installation, investigating the instability of perception. As she approaches a mountain, its familiar silhouette dissolves into dirt, stones, trees, and fog, revealing how closer observation can destabilize rather than confirm what we think we know.
Yuanlu (Victoria) Ma, After the Shell (2026)
Yuanlu Ma is a textile artist and designer exploring material transformation and the relationship between softness and structure. Her cloud-like After the Shell occupies an unfinished state of transformation, where one form has been left behind but whatever comes next has not yet fully taken shape.
Megan Ulrich, Untitled (They Lied to Us, Captain) (2025)
Megan Ulrich is a sculptor interested in geological time, precarious landscapes, and unseen systems. Her apparently stone-like but precarious sculpture considers melting permafrost, exposing the instability beneath structures, both natural and human-made, that we assume to be solid.
Molly Morin, Welcome (2026)
Molly Morin is a sculptor and fiber artist whose practice examines technology, labor, and production. In Welcome, she unravels discarded commercial sweaters and remakes their yarn using a hand-powered knitting machine, transforming mass-produced waste into an experiment in slower, alternative ways of making.
Jaewon Jung, Don’t Be Rude / Don’t Rush Me (2026)
Jaewon Jung is a painter exploring social pressure, emotional restraint, and internalized behavior. Don’t Be Rude / Don’t Rush Me examines the moment when suppressed anger, long accepted as natural, becomes recognizable as learned, opening familiar patterns of behavior to reconsideration.
Cecilia McKinnon, Wormcharming I, II (2026)
Cecilia McKinnon is an interdisciplinary artist exploring entropy, precarious landscapes, and natural histories. Wormcharming I, II connects worm charming with geological drilling, asking how attempts to uncover what lies beneath the surface can disrupt and transform the histories they seek to reveal.
Hantian Zhang is a San Francisco-based writer and emerging curator whose work explores how contemporary art engages moments of technological, ecological, and social change. His art criticism and exhibition reviews have appeared in Afterimage and Art Spiel, while his essays and fiction have been published in journals including AGNI, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, The Offing, River Styx, DIAGRAM, and Necessary Fiction. Holding a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, Zhang brings an interdisciplinary perspective to his curatorial practice, which is grounded in research,
narrative, and new ways of seeing.
