Amalgamation

UNDERSTORY, an artist-run gallery championing new and emerging voices, opens Amalgamation on September 17, 2026. Humanity and technology have become so deeply intertwined that each now shapes the identity, direction, and future of the other. This exhibition sits within that entanglement—the strange, accelerating space where the line between the organic and the engineered is no longer legible. We don’t just build tools. We grow with them, and they grow with us. The work in this exhibition imagines this exchange as a living thing: weird hybrids, fantastical growth, machine-human forms that are neither warning nor prophecy but something stranger, a merging that is neither one thing nor the other.

How did we get here, and where are we headed? Scientists named our era the Anthropocene, a geological age driven by relentless technological acceleration. We know this acceleration has reshaped the planet. But how has it reshaped the way we see each other and the natural world we are part of? The exhibition does not answer so much as insist we stay with the question.

Four artists give that entanglement form. Jonah Jacobs, a material alchemist, transforms up-cycled cardboard and household castoffs into intricate, coral-like sculptures that seem to grow and colonize the gallery floor, asking how value is made and destroyed within a culture of consumption. Nicolas Romano, a media artist and former electrical engineer, treats code as an artistic medium, exploring how the devices in our pockets quietly alter how we inhabit space. Jamie Richey’s mixed media works layer photography with video projection mapping to surface the loneliness and daily directives of a hyper-connected life. Douglas Becht fragments, reassembles, and duplicates the imagery of modern society: Pop Art, nostalgia, and street art collide into restless meditations on perception and culture.

Through organic forms rising from the floor, glowing screens, projection, and mixed media on found objects, the viewer experiences that merging. Amalgamation holds the past and the imagined future at once, insisting this entanglement is still ours to direct. Technology and humanity are feeding and growing each other. The future is not something happening to us. It is something we are still composing.

Join us for the opening reception of Amalgamation on Thursday, September 17, from 5–8 PM at UNDERSTORY, located on the RAMP (lower level) at 78th Street Studios in Cleveland. On view September 17 through October 17.