Words by Amanda Juico Dela Cruz
At one corner of Art Underground is Oras, a series of works of polyptych canvases: a blank clock being enwreathed by smaller clocks with their hands telling the hour and the minute, and each juxtaposed with a human hand pointing at the center. Kathleen Gobasco draws from the painfully precise language of the Ancient Greeks, from chronos and kairos. The hands of the clock speak the lexicon of chronos, the fundamental concept of time as a measurement of duration, periodicity, and age. It reveals the temporal reality of the Universe. In Aristotle’s Physics, the philosopher defined time as the “number of motion with respect to the before and after.”
The human hands, meanwhile, are a reminder of the kairos, the time beyond its technical implications in the Universe. It is the “right time”, as loosely translated, that holds an event in a special position in its sequence. It is that which that needs to happen at that specific moment, not at any other time.
The one year-worth of time that Gobasco spent in the BPO industry ran too slowly for the young artist, but an office job could provide for her family. Her day would start by looking forward to her lunch breaks and time outs, a tell-tale sign she was for something else. In 2017, she took a risk: a career shift, one she could pursue in a studio.
She has not paused since then.
Sa Sandaling Pagtigil, the title of her first solo exhibition, is the pause Gobasco needed to hark back on what she has missed out. The surrounding clocks are her loved ones, including her father and her maternal grandfather whose last grain of sand in their respective hourglasses declared their time was up. While she is living in her own chronos and kairos in a studio, she says, she does not notice that the people in her home are living in their own chronos and kairos too. As she buries herself with the deadlines by and submissions to galleries, those she holds dear are also running out of earthly time.
She has regrets, she admits. Her regrets are visually rendered through her Hapunan, an installation of dismembered hands in the middle of a dinner while frozen in their own stories—a pair of wrinkled hands occupying the kabisera, in contrast to the smooth pair that asserts their own authority from the other end, some pairs lie on the table in resignation, the other holds a non-existing glass, while the other is eating with their bare hands. Dinner is a time for food as much as a time for familial love, but Gobasco has taken for granted these evenings she spent with her family. The dinners together have been redefined by the absence of those who used to occupy their own spaces in the dining table.
A bitter existential pill to swallow is that humans can live only in one spatio-temporal reality at a time. Gobasco talks honestly that she can only do so much. She has done what she could for her family—with the humble support she has extended from her earnings from her office job, then from her artistic endeavors—but she has her own meaningful existence to fulfill too. Her mother has told her stories about how Gobasco could have possibly gotten her artistic hands. Her father used to create displays for the major shopping malls, but their estrangement did not permit the young Gobasco to see her father in action. It was upon seeing her uncle do portraits drawn from DVD covers that she had an inkling she wanted to be an artist. The people around her nourished this path, alongside her own tenacity.
Hawak, a series of canvases and sculptural works depicting hands holding on to an invisible rope, is Gobasco’s footnote in her exhibition’s existential rendition of risks and regrets. A stark reminder that the “I” is the bearer of their own faith—reliance, credence, and hopes—that pushes their existence both forward and in spiral. This faith is the rope trail that, regardless of the direction one’s hands turn to, it keeps the self in its own path.
