Natural Order, Photographs by Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips

Center for Photographic Art, Sunset Center, Carmel
October 17 – November 29, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 17, 4:00 – 6:00pm

Carmel, CA— The Center for Photographic Art (CPA) located in the historic Sunset Center, is pleased to announce Natural Order, a beautiful photography exhibition by long-time friends and collaborators, Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips.

Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips both spend time in the weeds, looking closely at the cycles of natural growth pushing through the cracks of so-called civilized life. Natural Order centers on a shared motif of spiders and spiderwebs that weave literally and metaphorically through both artists' work. Webs offer up complex metaphors: while arrestingly beautiful, their evolutionary purpose is nevertheless entrapment. Natural Order maps this tension through our natural and unnatural Northern California coastal environs.

Moving to San Francisco in 2016 from the Inner Mongolia region of China, Lucien Liu began a routine of long picture-making walks through Golden Gate Park, a nature dramatically different from what he'd known in the arid, high desert of Mongolia. Turning his gaze from the intimacy of a dappled leaf to the churning expanse of the Pacific ocean, he poetically catalogues the accumulation of elements that make and remake this leafy oasis—an artificial landscape forged by humans from sand dunes as their city grid expanded in the 19th century, a wildly natural and yet fundamentally unnatural place.

In the twentieth century, the web was appropriated to describe the most ubiquitous technology of our lives—the world wide web—an omnipresent sixth element that ensnares us daily in its inorganic fibers. Presenting work from a new series Not a Cloud in the Sky, Rachel Phillips culls digital images of clouds suspended above the windowless data centers powering today's cloud computing and artificial intelligence fever dreams. These sky pictures serve as the basis for monoprints made outdoors directly from spiderwebs in a "pinch me, I'm real" reminder that the natural world undergirds even our most seemingly immaterial technologies.

We are thrilled to bring Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips' work to the Center for Photographic Art. Don't miss the chance to meet these artists and explorers in person at the opening reception on October 17.

What:   Natural Order, photographs by Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips
When: Opening reception: Saturday, October 17, 4:00-6:00pm; Exhibition on view: October 17- November 29, 2026. Gallery hours 12 to 4pm, Wednesday through Sunday.
Where: Center for Photographic Art, Sunset Center, San Carlos & 9th Avenue, Carmel-by-the-Sea
Tickets: Reception and artist talk: free and open to the public
Info:     https://photography.org/