Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation, performance
Website: arcega.us
Mike Arcega (also known as Michael Arcega) was born in 1973 in Manila, Philippines, and migrated with his family to the Los Angeles area at age ten. Fascinated by language from childhood — in part due to the verbal mutations of his vernacular Tagalog, infused with Spanish and English words — he relocated to San Francisco to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied with Carlos Villa and received a BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies in 1998. He received an MFA from Stanford University in 2009. He lives and works in San Francisco and is an Associate Professor in the Sculpture and Expanded Practice area at San Francisco State University. He is a member of the curatorial boards of Root Division Gallery and the Recology Artist in Residence Program.
His work has been exhibited at the de Young Museum, the Asian Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Asia Society in New York, and internationally in Bahrain, Beijing, Lisbon, and Manila. His awards include a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, the Artadia Award, the Joan Mitchell MFA Award, the Murphy Cadogan Fine Arts Fellowship, and two San Francisco Arts Commission artist grants. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, the New York Times, Art News, Flash Art, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Fountainhead Residency, ISCP in New York, the Unicorn Centre for Art in Beijing, and the Recology Artist Residency Program.
Arcega works primarily in sculpture and installation, with a practice that revolves largely around language — directly informed by research, material significance, and the format of jokes. His subject matter deals with sociopolitical circumstances where power relations are unbalanced: colonialism, anthropological “otherness,” religious authority, global capitalism, and the cultural residue of empire. His method is consistently to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar — through scale shifts, material substitutions, wordplay, and wry formal inversions. A recurring strategy is the construction of elaborate historical recreations: a twelve-foot Gothic cathedral façade made of oil-slicked PVC with oil-derrick spires (In Gaud We Trust, 2006); a fifteen-foot wooden Noah’s Ark whose hold contains strips of dried meat labeled with species names (Eternal Salivation, 2006); a hand-crafted Pacific outrigger canoe paddled across the Mississippi, Rio Grande, and San Francisco Bay (Baby, 2011–12) as an act of decolonial reversal. His more recent work has drawn on his Philippine heritage and the concept of anting-anting — protective talismans used by albularyos and healers — to examine objects of belief, power, and transformation in contemporary life.
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