MAY 18, 2002 - BABILONIA 1808 presents THE BROWN MAN'S BURDEN: Selected Works of Filipino Artists from the Babilonia Wilner Collection. Included in the exhibition are award winning artists Santiago Bose, Gabriel Barredo, Gaston Damag, Alfredo Esquillo, Jr., and Jose Legaspi. The title THE BROWN MAN'S BURDEN recalls, 100 years later, a Pear's Soap advertisement in Harper's Weekly which boasts: "The first step towards lightening The White Man's Burden, is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. Pear's soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth." The "dark corners" in this popular mainstream ad refer explicitly to America's newest colonies at the height of its aggressive Imperialist policies, the longest and most brutal battle being in and over the Philippines. 

The exhibition, which consists of painting, sculpture, and installation addresses issues of colonization by both the Spanish and American empires, giving birth to the notion that the Philippines spent 400 years in the convent and 50 years in Hollywood. Each artist explores different issues in the greater context of globalization that began in the Philippines as far back as the 16th century when Magellan landed, and was killed by, Chieftan Lapu-Lapu on the shores of Cebu. All explore the damage and burden colonized peoples are left to bear long after colonizers have physically and "officially" retreated.

THE BROWN MAN'S BURDEN begins Saturday, May 18, 2002 with an opening reception from 7-9 PM at 1808 Fifth Street in Berkeley. An Artist's Talk will be held at 5 PM prior to the reception.

The youngest artist in the exhibition, award-winning Alfredo Esquillo, Jr., paints in a style reminiscent of Spanish retablos, only he subverts the tradition to critique inherited negative attitudes. He paints tableaux of Philippine social life, attempting to uncover the surreal ironies of a culture convulsing with the myriad contradictions symptomatic of the post-colonial experience. 

Gabriel Barredo uses found metal objects and "trash" to build a baroque looking- sculpture with a magnifying eyepiece through which one can view a miniature image of Christ bobbing up and down. The methodical motion of this and other kinetic works by Barredo can lead one into a meditative state, or into a state of madness, depending. To see the usually massive religious icon contained within a tiny space has a reversing effect on the psyche accustomed, since the arrival of the first colonizers, to being the one contained. Within a finished Barredo piece, one can envision his process of going out and collecting trashed elements - of everyday life, of discarded history and culture - putting them back together again, and bringing them back to new life, albeit slower and squeakier. In a country where people literally die under the weight of garbage, Gabby Barredo makes no small contribution when he turns it into art. 

Jose (Jojo) Legaspi plays with the light of pastel to create dark portraits that seem to dramatize the explosion inevitable after the repression of a society, sexually and otherwise. His large pastel drawings express with a sense of great pathos and drama the internal conflict within the Philippine psyche, as he seems to experience it. The family portraits - anyone's family - included in the exhibition appear to be an exercise in the exorcism of demons.

Not a stranger to the Bay Area, Santiago Bose showed at Pacific Bridge Gallery in Oakland in 1999, alongside local S.F. artist Carlos Villa. His paintings, which often use collage as a technique, comment on the problems of nationhood. Bose maps out the terrain of the colonial mind and its subsequent decolonization. Spinning contradictions around media, spiritual beliefs, diasporic experience, and mass production, the artist exposes the working of cultural exchange, feudal gift giving, and the political economy of memory.

Damag, a French national of Ifugao descent lives and works in Paris. Damag pursues the logic of ethnographic representation through his use of cultural artifacts, but subverts the argument that within a museum or rarefied art context, objects must become subjects under surveillance. His mode of subjection is to present material culture as goods for the market: plundered, pillaged, smuggled out of their domains. His works also address the decimation of native culture by incorporating chopped up idols in a floor installation and idols which have been skewered onto fluorescent light tubes. The light tubes also recall the sculptures of Dan Flavin, adding another layer of critique.

BABILONIA 1808 is a non-profit, international contemporary art program whose mission includes promoting dialogue among communities through intercultural exchange, challenging audiences with provocative contemporary art, and highlighting the East Bay as a nucleus of vibrant creativity. BABILONIA 1808 is a program of the Babilonia Wilner Foundation (BWF) and is housed in an ecologically restored landmark - itself a demonstration of the foundation's mission to increase ecological awareness and practice by facilitating the exploration of cultural and environmental relationships through daily living, advocacy, outreach, education, arts and media productions.