ICA Central
Saturday, June 13, 2026 -
Sunday, September 13, 2026
https://www.catgunn.com/
About
On View · ICA San Diego / Central
Solo Museum Exhibition
Cat Gunn:
if only by the light of a new moon
About
Cat Gunn’s first solo museum exhibition, if only by the light of a new moon, explores the complex terrain of inherited memory and the seemingly impossible nostalgia for a home one has never known — an experience familiar to immigrants, first-generation children, and anyone displaced by colonialism, war, or occupation.
Gunn’s mother, Lida, grew up in poverty in post-war Manila. In the late 1970s she met Richard, an American working as a Vietnamese linguist with the US Air Force. They married and settled in Baltimore, where Gunn was raised. Whether because of the language barrier, faulty memories, or a reluctance to speak of hard times, Lida’s story — and by extension Gunn’s own Filipino heritage — has remained largely inaccessible to them.
Developed during Gunn’s year-long residency at ICA San Diego in 2025, the exhibition dissects the mechanisms of collective forgetting that often erase colonial conquest and imperial violence, asking who controls these narratives and why crucial information often remains withheld. Its title evokes illumination that is only barely perceptible — a longing for even the faintest glimmer of hope or truth.
Inside the exhibition
Pool
A single defining memory shapes much of the exhibition: Lida’s mother and grandmother hiding from Imperial Japanese soldiers in a ditch beside a mountain. Gunn recreates that landscape here — a field of fabric grass where ceramic papayas and pig heads, standing in for human bodies, wait to be found among symbols of colonial occupation and resistance. Entry is blocked by a pool of greenware and slipcast ceramic items that dissolve over the course of the exhibition, marking time and the impossibility of returning to the past.
Atrium
A pair of dramatic curtains made from barong fabric — a sheer textile traditionally used in Philippine ceremonial dress — introduce recurring motifs of veiling and unveiling, and the safety and vulnerability of hiding and being found. Accompanying the curtains, a video projection depicts a moon-like object rising over composite images of ocean waves from Sunset Cliffs, scored with archival natural sounds and original melodies by Kory Albert Johnson.
Living Room / Diasporic Home
A deconstructed living room combines reproductions of objects, produce, images, and patterns from Gunn’s childhood home — the place where they first began to understand certain cultural motifs. References to Lida’s creativity and resourcefulness appear in cast resin doilies and ceramic crochet slabs. Nearby, a television plays footage of the green grass installation, its green keyed out and replaced with Gunn’s own videos of the Southern California landscape — a gesture of connection between their current home and an ancestral one they’ve never seen.
The 2026 exhibition season is supported by the Linda Brandes Foundation, the Conrad Prebys Foundation, the Sahm Family Foundation and an Anonymous supporter.
ICA San Diego exhibition support is also provided by the City of San Diego, Wild Wisdom Foundation, Tippett Foundation, US Bank, and the Seth Sprague Education & Charitable Foundation.