Curatorial Statement
MONO8 Gallery’s Year-End Exhibition
Goodbye to All That
There are so many things to say about the year 2020, and yet, what comes to mind is the title of Joan Didion’s essay published in 1967. “Goodbye to All That” was a line that Didion borrowed from the title of Robert Graves’ autobiography, which was an introspection into his life before and after the First World War. It might have been a little absurd for the young Didion to have used the same title in an essay that chronicled her transformations as an adult in New York when compared to the bouts of people who lived through a period of war, but what attracted me to this line as a prompt for this exhibition is the generosity that Didion’s writing displayed as she enumerated every small detail of her life in the city. No memory is too small, trivial, or worthless. It was all about making sense of a life she had once lived. The essay ends with her moving back to California and understanding what she had lost and what she will never have again.
Rarely that an exhibition becomes personal in my curatorial practice (as I’d like to believe so). Still, I wanted to organize “Goodbye to All That” in recognition of the lives that, perhaps, we will never live again. It will be an understatement to mention that we now carry some form of fear instilled in our bodies. What we know is that COVID-19’s haunting invisible presence increased and amplified all the dangers in the world: human rights abuses, corruption, poverty, fascism, natural disasters. The list is endless; the struggle is tiring.
In the months following the lockdowns, I had hours of conversations with artists, many of whom are part of this exhibition about the futility of art in a time of peril and survival. Some were hesitant to prove this idea wrong. To me, this hesitation in imposing art’s essentiality sort of defined the role of artists and the cultural force in today’s society. That, in times of uncertainty, we often choose to stand in solidarity with the rest of the world, and perhaps, waiting for the time when the world will stand with us. The pandemic had brought welcome and unwelcome changes. Dozens of exhibitions have been mounted to reiterate all of them; hundreds of essays have been written as the situation unfolds. What the circumstances might reveal to us, in the end, could be cathartic but could also be useless. In all of it, what we hold in our hands is our ability to concede to the present and discern how we would move forward.
Didion writes, “I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.” Looking back, this may have been what the past nine months had become: a door that caught us in the middle of our daydreaming. Thus, “Goodbye to All That” is a collection and a summary of what all of us in this exhibition would like to leave behind. If only we had a proper moment in the year 2020, it didn’t have to be so quick and yet too exhausting. Maybe there’s a reward waiting for all of this, some sense of poetic justice that pits us to a climax where we all become heroes. That kind of thing comes up almost certainly in movies and novels. We are burdened by the ambivalence of time. Still, even in the most performative of ways, pointless or not, we can decide what we want to forget, what we don’t want to bring as we tread on this new street. Good riddance and goodbye to all of that.
- Gwen Bautista
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Gwen Bautista (b. 1984) is an art journalist, artist, and is the resident curator of MONO8 Gallery. She is interested in observing subtle forms of oppression tied to personal and political narratives as themes in art and exhibition making. Bautista studied Fine Arts (Painting) at the University of the Philippines-Diliman and is an alumna of Para Site Workshops for Emerging Arts Professionals in Hong Kong. She was a finalist at the Ateneo Art Awards, Purita Kalaw-Ledesma Prizes in Art Criticism (2019).
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Angela Silva
Atsuko Yamagata
August Lyle Espino
Celine Lee
Ches Gatpayat
Chicco Ramos
Dexter Sy
Don Bryan Bunag
Faye Pamintuan
Indy Paredes
Issay Rodriguez
Jan Sunday
Jed Gregorio
Jessica De Leon
Jomari T'leon
Jonas Eslao
Kelli Maeshiro
Koki Lxx
Luis Hidalgo
Margaux Blas
Miguel Lorenzo Uy
Miguel Puyat
Noelle Varela & Raymond Briones
Omega Projects
Pauline Reynolds
Pepe Delfin
Pin Calacal
Poeleen Alvarez
Raha Rodriguez
Regina Reyes
Renz Baluyot
Roan Alvarez
Roselle Perez
Shiela Molato
Teo Esguerra
Therese Nicole Reyes
Veronica Lazo
Victoria