This Friday at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, in Manila: 4 of my drawings are included in “Chromatext Rebooted“.

The show (the 4th in the Chromatext project, initiated in 1983) involves artworks based on, coupled with, or related to words/poems/prose, or any kind of visual art executed by poets/writers, including abstract, sculptural, conceptual and digital works. Collaborations between writers and artists are also featured. This is how the ever-debonair, rascal-gentleman-poet R. Zamora Linmark came to ask me if I would like to make some visual responses to his 7-poem group “Daily Quickies”.

Since Zack’s poems were short and snappy, I made 7 new drawings, based on either classic New Yorker cartoons or old editorial cartoons of my own, and then laid the poems out as absurdist captions. Due to space constraints, only 4 of our collaborations are on display.

Below, 2 of the results. “Postscript” is 1 of the 4 being shown at the CCP; “Love” is one of the 3 that live a more private existence.

Collapse I (Santa Cruz, California 1989)
acrylic on canvas
24×36 inches
2015

It used to a fairly predictable convention of grade school that students would begin each fall term with some sort of “What I Did Last Summer” warm-up essay. In a similar spirit, here’s a recap of the past few months in the Wofflehouse universe, crammed into one long post so that we can move on to other, more current, items.

May and June in the Bay Area: basically an insane blur. Went straight from teaching spring classes and painting like a maniac in the studio into teaching double summer session classes and painting like a maniac in the studio. I also gave a strange performance at Southern Exposure, and presented at that Asian Art Museum panel discussion from my previous post.

This kind of flurry is a regular pattern for me: I tend to thrive during these bursts of intense work and little wiggle room, and happily, over the years it has evolved out of being an experience of stress and crisis into one of energy and focus. (But let’s not kid ourselves–there’s always got to be some level of friction and pressure to kick me into high gear.)

The entire spring involved a lot of extended studio time, almost entirely working on paintings for Collapse, my solo project at Silverlens Galleries. While I’ve always painted, I’ve never considered myself a painter, which is hilarious if only because my new line of late has been that I don’t consider myself a performance artist, even though I’ve been doing performance projects lately.  I suppose that my resistance to terms like “painter” and “performance artist” has less to do with fear of labels or being inadequate, and more to do with the feeling that my practice is interdisciplinary, first and foremost. It’s not a romance with any specific discipline–it’s more of a pragmatic “this is the medium that fits this project best” attitude. Anyway, my point here is that I really came to enjoy painting in ways that felt very new to me, and I taught myself a bunch of new tricks that I expect to expand upon.

I also got seriously into audio books for the first time, which made a tremendous difference in my solitary studio experience. While it’s already been mentioned that I’ve learned to anchor myself to audio material for those long studio hauls when I get fidgety, I’d never actually listened to this much long-form book material, ever. Whole new world. Totally hooked; love the immersion. It’s a fun new way to be a reader again.

Summer teaching and work on the new paintings ended at the beginning of July, at which point K and I flew to Manila to drop off the work for framing in advance of the show, and to do a little traveling before the opening. A few days in Manila to acclimate, then off to Hong Kong and Bangkok briefly before returning to Manila to finalize the installation.

Having not been to HK since I was a kid, I was floored by how futuristic and intensely vertical it is. I absolutely loved it, and could easily see staying there for an extended period of time. We also geeked it up and made a pilgrimage to the Mira Hotel, simply because it’s where Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill were all staying at the time of the big NSA document leak, for a little “citizenfour” happy hour.

Bangkok felt a bit more familiar, (if anything so ethereal, gilded and congested can ever feel “familiar”), in part because I’d been there somewhat more recently, and because it had some surprising parallels to Manila. Despite the tourist throngs at certain venues, we still managed to find our way into more intimate spots, before heading back to the Philippines.

Through the kind of lovely serendipity that often accompanies my time in Manila, Silverlens scheduled my show at the same time as solo projects by my good friend Gina Osterloh (who was part of my 2007 Galleon Trade project), and new friend Hanna Pettyjohn. All 3 of us live in the US, so summer happened to be the best option for all of our schedules. Our opening reception, just in advance of the 3-day weekend Eid holiday, was a great reunion with many old friends we hadn’t seen in a long time. Eliza and the Wah also used my show as the jumping-off point for an Asia trip of their own, so it was great to have a little more SF representation at the reception as well.

The rest of the time in the Philippines was good, although traffic was more hellacious than I’ve ever experienced in all of my visits, which made catching up with some friends across the city nearly impossible. Still, there were a number of epic nights, and grand reconnections with friends there that made it all worthwhile.

Made a couple of excursions out of Manila to get some brief but wonderful beach time, but overall, this was an intensely urban trip, and I spent way more time in big cities than I’d originally anticipated. But I got invited to participate in and moderate a really interesting  Asia-Europe exchange project called Curating-In-Depth 2, and met some great arts people from Slovenia, Thailand, Malaysia and Croatia that I’m looking forward to staying in touch with.

After Manila, I ended up in Taipei for a few days. Various friends had been raving about it, which piqued my curiosity, so I did a little solo stopover en route back to the US. Ate many amazing things, saw some great art spaces, got trapped in my hotel during a massive typhoon…you know, the usual.

 

Getting back to SF in August was predictably a bit of a let-down. I rarely get depressed after great trips end, but I do find that I like staying in the acclimation chamber longer than necessary if I’m allowed to, and not fully readjusting to my usual routine, if I can avoid it. (This usually looks suspiciously like ordinary idle time.)

Still, within a couple weeks of my return it was time to shift out of the chamber, and back into school prep and new art projects mode, which is more or less where I still am. Now that I’ve parceled this all up in one post, though, I’ll save those other tidbits for subsequent entries. Stay tuned.

On May 21st, State of the State: Contemporary Filipino/American Art in the Bay Area took place in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum’s glorious Samsung Hall:

Organized and led by the ever-brilliant Thea Quiray Tagle, this panel discussion featured Mike Arcega, Lordy Rodriguez, Cece Carpio, Eliza Barrios and yours truly, Woffles McGillicuddy. (Additional shout-out to AAM’s charming Marc Mayer, for making this all possible).

Thea just finished teaching a class on Carlos Villa and his legacy at SFAI and had also researched and written about his work in her dissertation, so she smartly thought to name the panel after this piece:

Thea gave a wonderful, generous preamble, crisply contextualizing Carlos’ work as an artist and educator, as well as his particular obsession with unearthing the existence of Filipino-American art history.

From there, we broke into a lively, earnest discussion of some of the complexities of  and overlaps in our respective work as Filipino-American artists, and took some great, thoughtful audience questions at the end.

(Also, we were eating snacks and drinking hooch out of plastic cups behind our name cards throughout the panel, hence the sudden visibility of a flask here at the end:)

It was really more of a verbal than visual experience, so for those of you hungry for  a full 90 minutes of this conversation, voilà! Video of the event is now available here, courtesy of the Asian Art Museum:

I just came across this reflection on social media from a slightly younger Fil-Am artist who attended our panel:

“This was honestly one of the more exciting things I’ve attended in the past year. I’ve always had mixed feelings about making work from my mixed identities (as hapa, as queer, as not quite Filipino, not quite gay, not quite male, not quite artist, as artist, etc) and Thea Quiray Tagle’s roundtable gave me much more confidence to start working from that mess.”

Sigh. Warm feelings. This is everything that keeps me going, and makes me so grateful for opportunities to engage in public conversations like these.