Time Traveling Through Cece Carpio’s New Exhibition at SOMArts

Inside SOMArts gallery, the walls are adorned with sharp machete blades everywhere, and a pair of adorable, covertly embedded dangly earrings. Bold depictions of goddesses, painted in acrylic on wood and canvas, are surrounded by real bird feathers, wicker fans and seashells.

In one corner, a suspended pile of sticks rotating counterclockwise is accentuated with miscellaneous objects, including a mug with the face of Gromit from Wallace and Gromit. In another corner, a multimedia installation airs an archival video from the EDSA People Power Revolution of February 1986 in Manila, Philippines.

The wide range of materials — which also includes boots, a bottle of small-batch rum, surf boards, driftwood, brass bowls, copper containers and more blades than one can count — is all part of renowned visual artist Cece Carpio’s first solo gallery exhibition, Tabi Tabi Po: Come Out with the Spirits! You Are Welcome Here.

“The literal translation is ‘set aside, set aside,'” Carpio says of the exhibition’s title during a video call, noting the cultural norm of repeating a word for of emphasis. The title derives from the belief that spirits live in the forest, where one must “carve pathways” and “ask for permission to be able to walk through where they’re living.”

The exhibition, on view through March 29, provides a look into the heritage, heart and mind of a longtime painter whose work can be found on walls of the streets around the Bay Area, and in countries around the world.

Using more than paint, Carpio combines multiple mediums with poetically penned descriptions, bringing audiences into a world where time travel and mysticism overlap with oral traditions and family history. Ultimately, her work reimagines what we understand, and creatively fills in the gaps where knowledge is lacking.

Born in the Philippines and raised by her great-grandmother until the age of 12, Carpio attests that, in many ways, this exhibition is an ode to the matriarch of her family.

“She passed away in 1998 when she was 99 years old,” Carpio says of her great-grandmother. The year of her birth, 1899, is now tattooed on the artist’s neck.

Carpio’s great-grandmother was a midwife, an herbalist, a farmer and more. She survived wars and outlived her husband, as well as her own children. “She raised my mother, who then left [for America] when I was like three months old, and then she raised me,” says Carpio, affirming that her great-grandmother raised five generations in total. “Her story is time travel.”

Childhood interactions with her great-grandmother brought about Carpio’s earliest art pieces. Living in a farming village where tropical fruits readily grew, Carpio would illustrate things that were rare to her, like apples brought back from the United States by her parents during visits. When Carpio wasn’t teaching her great-grandmother how to read numbers, she would illustrate stories she’d learned at school.

“I wanted share that with her,” Carpio tells me. “Obviously, there were words” — at the time, she was also learning English herself — “but sometimes, the images actually say so much more.”

Education went both ways. Carpio’s great-grandmother, not a woman of many words, would wake every morning and sweep the leaves in the front yard before burning them; a custom in their village. Carpio sees this seemingly mundane practice, a morning meditation of sorts, as a microcosm of the lack of understanding about indigenous cultures.

“If you’re an outsider looking in, then it’s something unfamiliar. I guess that’s what they make a lot of movies and animation about,” she posits, referencing the scene from The Little Mermaid where Ariel sees a fork and thinks it’s a comb.

“If it’s not familiar in people’s eyes, then it is going to be odd, it is going to be awkward, it’s going to be weird,” Carpio says sharply. “But if you practice it every day, and you have a whole community practicing every day, you don’t necessarily question it anymore.”

Navigating “the norm” has been prevalent throughout Carpio’s life. As a kid she accepted that her parents living nearly 7,000 miles away was the way things were. When Carpio herself moved to the United States as a preteen, she learned to deal with cultural differences — namely, her accent — by drawing.

“Art became a tool of communication,” she says, recalling middle school days where she’d draw characters and flyers for folks’ birthday parties in exchange for a dollar or two. “And that made me cool,” Carpio says with a laugh. “It’s like, ‘It’s that girl who, I don’t know if she talks, but she can draw.'”

Blessed to have landed in the Bay Area, Carpio still celebrates finding “like-hearted and like-minded people.” She’s built deep bonds with others also raised by their grandparents or great-grandparents. She’s befriended folks who listened to bedtime stories that didn’t come from books, but from the mouths of elders. She’s found community in people who were also allowed to play with machetes at five years old.

To this day, Carpio, a member of the Trust Your Struggle Collective, says that members of her crew sometimes gift small daggers to each other. Both practical and symbolic, Carpio says the daggers are a reminder that “we are trying to cut the injustices of… all those things that we know are not working.”

Growing up poor, she says, forced Carpio to dream. In turn, her imagination became a tool of survival. She learned to change things she couldn’t control, and create things when there was a lack. She used story, myths and folklore to explain the incomprehensible.

And that’s on par with how she lives now. “In this show,” she says, “I’m highlighting some of those mythologies.”

Using folklore and mythology, she says, is more normal than not. And, she adds, it plays a big part in her process of creating art.

“We create things that we not only imagine,” she professes, “but we see and we believe. At least that’s a hope.”

‘Tabi Tabi Po: Come Out with the Spirits! You Are Welcome Here’ is on view through March 29 at SOMArts (934 Brannan St, San Francisco). Details and more information here.