ALMOST THERE, THROUGH FLOATING DREAD (2020) is a site-specific sculptural-audio work that merges family storytelling with a tale of the SS City of Rio de Janeiro or ‘SS Rio,’ whose crew burnt parts of the ship as fuel when coal ran out mid-voyage in the Pacific in 1896. The ship— now sunken in the mouth of the Golden Gate not far from the exhibition site— holds synchronous coincidence with the artist’s family history: sharing a name; once connecting two homes, San Francisco and Manila; and crashing on fogged rocks by the Point Bonita Lighthouse near his Headlands Center for the Arts 960 studio on his birthday nearly a century before. Empty ship-in-a-bottle vessels resonate and emit oral stories through its glass of ill-fortuned water: the artist’s mother recounts a fortune teller’s fulfilled predictions with warning of water as her signos, while the artist’s father recalls survival floating training exercises from the US Navy. Engraved brass plates for each bottle hold text lifted from the 1896 Marine Engineer article “The Fleets of the Mail Lines: Overdue” that documented the SS Rio’s self-fueled Pacific survival. Passing between these bottles, the viewer simultaneously floats between historical narratives of autonomy and fate, goal-oriented self-sacrifice, and survival, as triangulated guidance for a multilayered present-day floating dread.
While these metaphors are of anxieties with being stuck, struck, or sunken, of dealing with that fear, and of self-consumption/sacrifice to reach a destination— the stories are also wholly about resourcefulness, resiliency, madiskarte, vulnerability, generosity, and hope amidst heavy winds and changing waters.
Thank you to Gemma and Bernardo Rio, Lindsay Howland, Zach Searcy, Charlene Tan, Jerome Reyes, Robin Beard, Ileana Tejada, Lex Calip, Yomna Osman, Aay Preston-Myint, Headlands Center for the Arts, Seattle Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, Center for Research Libraries Access, and Root Division.
ALMOST THERE THROUGH FLOATING DREAD (2020), Glass bottles, red oak, engraved brass plates, audio exciters/surface transducers, and multichannel audio track, 14 minutes 59 seconds. Photo documentation by Andria Lo.