Bahala na
Reception: October 2nd, 6pm-9pm
Artists
Michael Arcega
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
Karen Finley
Amy Hibbs
Luis G. Hernandez
Lordy Rodriguez
Charlene Tan
Andrew Woodward
Video Works
Em Jiang
Handsome Asian Motorcycle Club
Off-site installation at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles
Mik Gaspay
Michael Arcega
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
Karen Finley
Amy Hibbs
Luis G. Hernandez
Lordy Rodriguez
Charlene Tan
Andrew Woodward
Video Works
Em Jiang
Handsome Asian Motorcycle Club
Off-site installation at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles
Mik Gaspay
Bahala na presents a multi-media art exhibition of creative action due to uncertain circumstances. The Filipinx mantra “bahala na” is associated with both a resignation that events will work themselves out as expected or proclaimed, as well as the certainty of a fully indeterminate outcome. This productive fatalism or yielding is based in an attitude of adaptation and use, common among the works in this show, which equally open onto wider, physical relationships with the built environment of the street itself. Time possesses an uncertain relationship in this space, as events can occur that seem both apart from time and completely of the present: with COVID-19 and the ongoing movement for racial justice as a backdrop, this exhibition touches multifaceted approaches to social observation, awareness and creation.
The artists in Bn2020 share an interest in working with and through the streets and the systems that govern them, by utilizing direct responses, seriousness and humor. Their chosen mediums range from individualized studio work to community sourced creation, but are generated from practices of assembly within the constraints of what is available. There is no evidence that escape from these constraints is possible, yet it is through this systemic relationship to the external world, whether symbolic, physical, or conceptual, that these works still emerge. Bahala Na is present in this entanglement, an artistic attitude simultaneously direct and subversive, temporal and a-temporal, in the complex language of change.
Michael Arcega’s TNT Traysikel (2020) works as a functional intervention into the matrix of roadways criss-crossing the Bay Area. Both a functional vehicle and a sculptural artifice, Arcega’s work performs unconformity, nodding to the Bahala Na spirit that pervades South Bay car and biker culture. Trike indexes the roads that it traverses and the contexts in which it is ridden, including its recent participation in Biker protests as part of the Black Lives Matter Movement in San Francisco. It both yields itself to its use, while asserting its individuation.
The artists participating in the exhibition are producers of art objects but equally operate within the expanded field of social practice, interrogating the complex relationships between societal dynamics and urban planning. Bahala na aspires to draw its audience into nuanced complicity with the works and their wider operational context, simultaneously an effort toward testimony, response, and action, in a time of unprecedented civil and global engagement.
Street Moves: A Screening Series
In one reading of Bahala Na’s core proposal of embeddedness in circumstances, the literalized translation of the mantra into “whatever happens, happens,” guarantees one thing: something will indeed happen. As a physical location and a metaphor, the street is an ideal test case for this pessimistic futurism, given the prescribed but equally dynamic subversions that are continuously enacted upon the street’s concrete service by driving, walking, loitering, or occupying its public realm. This condition of assumed action impacts practices of viewing, processing, and predicting events: one cannot help but think of the profound attention of isolation present in riding, traversing, moving lonely from one point to another over the street, the certainty of going from A to B. Such an attentive condition generates, through Bahala Na, a different kind of viewing practice that the medium of film opens productively onto, as exemplified through the works screened.
Mik Gaspay at San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles
In collaboration with the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, Bahala Na has commissioned a new quilt-based work by Mik Gaspay and May Gaspay, coinciding with Filipino American History Month. Mik and May critically interrogate the optimism latent in Bahala Na, seeking to physically archive their family home in the Philippines that was destroyed during a monsoon. Producing an assembled, unwieldy record, collaboratively developed between Mother and Son, the Gaspays’ work stages a genealogical intervention of mourning as it tries to reconstruct the impossible. Placing the pressure that could only come from a practice of love on the systemic limits of time itself, their quilted specter haunts, a reminder or reinscription of the forgotten, minor, integral moments of transpacific Filipino American History.
Genealogical intervention of mourning, reconstruction of the impossible, putting the pressure that only a practice of love can on the systemic limits of time itself - work haunts, reminds, reinscribes the forgotten, minor, integral moments of Filipino American History.
Bahala na Initiative, Exhibition and Programs
Inspired by a philosophical mantra, Bahala na presents a multi-site contemporary art experience, bringing artists, educators, writers, and performers together to generate a platform for social practice and community engagement. Working through a wide range of expressive disciplines, Bahala Na seeks to facilitate the breakdown of traditional modes of presentation, instead proposing a model of dynamic collectivity amongst audiences, artists and institutions.
One Description of Bahala na
Bahala na is an attitude of optimistic acceptance, fatalistic resignation and determination, in acknowledging that the outcome of an uncertain situation is beyond one's control or is preordained to produce an outcome unknown; ‘que, sera sera’ or ‘whatever happens, happens’. Hence also as a noun: an approach characterized by this attitude, which echoes the challenges, absurdities and humor of life.
Director and Curator
Chris Sícat, Director is an artist, independent curator and educator. He graduated from Otis/Parsons School of Design (BFA) and the New York Academy of Arts (MFA). Sicat has exhibited his works at Southern Exposure, Intersection for the Arts, Root Division, de Saisset Museum and Palo Alto Art Center in the Bay Area, CA. He is represented by K. Imperial Fine Arts in San Francisco. CA. Sicat was the Artistic Director of performance art group Bastard Company, which has performed at Highways Performance Space, Side Street Project (LA) and East West Players. Sicat has directed the Hatch Gallery, UPSpace, Aidan Ryley Taylor Gallery in Los Angeles and the Vernon Davis Gallery in San Jose. He has curated numerous exhibitions such as the Gold Rush at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, “The Rejection Show” at the Hatch Gallery in Los Angeles, which was highlighted on the BBC The World. And most recently co-curated “Future IDs”, a year long exhibition and programs on Alcatraz Island (U.S. National Park Service).
Theodore Lau, Curator is an independent curator, researcher, and writer based in the Bay Area, currently thinking about American Diasporic communities and transpacific notions of relation. He has previously held positions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, KADIST Art Foundation (San Francisco), and Brown University. He graduated from Brown University (B.A. Honors) in December 2019.
The artists in Bn2020 share an interest in working with and through the streets and the systems that govern them, by utilizing direct responses, seriousness and humor. Their chosen mediums range from individualized studio work to community sourced creation, but are generated from practices of assembly within the constraints of what is available. There is no evidence that escape from these constraints is possible, yet it is through this systemic relationship to the external world, whether symbolic, physical, or conceptual, that these works still emerge. Bahala Na is present in this entanglement, an artistic attitude simultaneously direct and subversive, temporal and a-temporal, in the complex language of change.
Michael Arcega’s TNT Traysikel (2020) works as a functional intervention into the matrix of roadways criss-crossing the Bay Area. Both a functional vehicle and a sculptural artifice, Arcega’s work performs unconformity, nodding to the Bahala Na spirit that pervades South Bay car and biker culture. Trike indexes the roads that it traverses and the contexts in which it is ridden, including its recent participation in Biker protests as part of the Black Lives Matter Movement in San Francisco. It both yields itself to its use, while asserting its individuation.
The artists participating in the exhibition are producers of art objects but equally operate within the expanded field of social practice, interrogating the complex relationships between societal dynamics and urban planning. Bahala na aspires to draw its audience into nuanced complicity with the works and their wider operational context, simultaneously an effort toward testimony, response, and action, in a time of unprecedented civil and global engagement.
Street Moves: A Screening Series
In one reading of Bahala Na’s core proposal of embeddedness in circumstances, the literalized translation of the mantra into “whatever happens, happens,” guarantees one thing: something will indeed happen. As a physical location and a metaphor, the street is an ideal test case for this pessimistic futurism, given the prescribed but equally dynamic subversions that are continuously enacted upon the street’s concrete service by driving, walking, loitering, or occupying its public realm. This condition of assumed action impacts practices of viewing, processing, and predicting events: one cannot help but think of the profound attention of isolation present in riding, traversing, moving lonely from one point to another over the street, the certainty of going from A to B. Such an attentive condition generates, through Bahala Na, a different kind of viewing practice that the medium of film opens productively onto, as exemplified through the works screened.
Mik Gaspay at San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles
In collaboration with the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, Bahala Na has commissioned a new quilt-based work by Mik Gaspay and May Gaspay, coinciding with Filipino American History Month. Mik and May critically interrogate the optimism latent in Bahala Na, seeking to physically archive their family home in the Philippines that was destroyed during a monsoon. Producing an assembled, unwieldy record, collaboratively developed between Mother and Son, the Gaspays’ work stages a genealogical intervention of mourning as it tries to reconstruct the impossible. Placing the pressure that could only come from a practice of love on the systemic limits of time itself, their quilted specter haunts, a reminder or reinscription of the forgotten, minor, integral moments of transpacific Filipino American History.
Genealogical intervention of mourning, reconstruction of the impossible, putting the pressure that only a practice of love can on the systemic limits of time itself - work haunts, reminds, reinscribes the forgotten, minor, integral moments of Filipino American History.
Bahala na Initiative, Exhibition and Programs
Inspired by a philosophical mantra, Bahala na presents a multi-site contemporary art experience, bringing artists, educators, writers, and performers together to generate a platform for social practice and community engagement. Working through a wide range of expressive disciplines, Bahala Na seeks to facilitate the breakdown of traditional modes of presentation, instead proposing a model of dynamic collectivity amongst audiences, artists and institutions.
One Description of Bahala na
Bahala na is an attitude of optimistic acceptance, fatalistic resignation and determination, in acknowledging that the outcome of an uncertain situation is beyond one's control or is preordained to produce an outcome unknown; ‘que, sera sera’ or ‘whatever happens, happens’. Hence also as a noun: an approach characterized by this attitude, which echoes the challenges, absurdities and humor of life.
Director and Curator
Chris Sícat, Director is an artist, independent curator and educator. He graduated from Otis/Parsons School of Design (BFA) and the New York Academy of Arts (MFA). Sicat has exhibited his works at Southern Exposure, Intersection for the Arts, Root Division, de Saisset Museum and Palo Alto Art Center in the Bay Area, CA. He is represented by K. Imperial Fine Arts in San Francisco. CA. Sicat was the Artistic Director of performance art group Bastard Company, which has performed at Highways Performance Space, Side Street Project (LA) and East West Players. Sicat has directed the Hatch Gallery, UPSpace, Aidan Ryley Taylor Gallery in Los Angeles and the Vernon Davis Gallery in San Jose. He has curated numerous exhibitions such as the Gold Rush at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, “The Rejection Show” at the Hatch Gallery in Los Angeles, which was highlighted on the BBC The World. And most recently co-curated “Future IDs”, a year long exhibition and programs on Alcatraz Island (U.S. National Park Service).
Theodore Lau, Curator is an independent curator, researcher, and writer based in the Bay Area, currently thinking about American Diasporic communities and transpacific notions of relation. He has previously held positions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, KADIST Art Foundation (San Francisco), and Brown University. He graduated from Brown University (B.A. Honors) in December 2019.