Comets freighted with a different type of meaning are lighting up Chelsea this winter at Silverlens, New York. Gregory Halili—whose name is evocative of Halley’s—is showing comets he has assembled using items sourced from secondhand shops in the Philippines: lamps, musical instruments, garden ornaments, porcelain fragments along with molten metal, crystals, and shells. Some are rigged as functioning lamps; others feature Halili’s miniature paintings, meticulously rendered on glass and mother-of-pearl. All comets are perfectly balanced on wooden bases (and yes, they spin).

Endaya describes this work as a kind of self-portrait, even if none of the figures resemble her. She has perhaps always seen herself in each of these women, which speaks to the empathy that radiates in her work. In Kahapon Muli Bukas, she asks us to do the same: every worn object, unsettling gaze, and victorious posture moves us to close the distance between ourselves and the neglected Filipino women of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

The exhibition demonstrates the artist’s conceptual approach while using different media—objects, video, photographs, and drawings—all derived from his diving expeditions in various sites. One of his main aquatic hauls, the “ghost net,” which was used to catch fish and later to fend off trash from being swept to a nearby shore—had grown its own colonies of barnacles, coral recruits, and algae as it sat on the seabed, threatening to inflict further damage on other marine life.