MIKA CASTAÑEDA + CAT GUNN
...AND LOVE DARES YOU TO CARE FOR [A MICHELADA WITH SAN MIGUEL]
July 11 - August 15, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION ON SATURDAY, JULY 11 5 to 8pm
BEST PRACTICE is pleased to present …And love dares you to care for [a michelada with San Miguel], a two-person exhibition featuring new works by mika Castañeda and Cat Gunn. Both artists utilize materials and imagery that imply the physical hands or touch the objects once felt, as well as the traces and resonances of these touches. Their emphasis on fragments of personal archives, notes, gifts, and recorded memories aligns with their overlapping themes of queerness, (in)visibility, material memory, and resisting archival violence. By examining these fragments through their individual art practices, Castañeda and Gunn make visible that which is unseen— through transmitting memory, their labor, and the care instilled in the staging of objects.
Cat Gunn's practice investigates how incomplete access to history affects individual identity and familial bonds in the present. They work in ceramics, sculpture, and installation to create spaces and arrangements reminiscent of deconstructed altars, domestic spaces, and fragmented structures. Their compositions of modular pieces— ranging from alchemical material investigations to piles of ceramic fruit to found objects— offer non-linear narratives and interrogate how objects and materiality mediate relationships and memories. Utilizing the framework of racial melancholia, Gunn's work evaluates the relationship and imperial impacts of the US occupation of the Philippines from 1898-1946. This melancholia is an unresolved grief or inherent sense of loss resulting from processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization. Gunn examines the mechanisms of collective forgetting that often erase colonial conquest and imperial violence, instead asking who controls these narratives, why crucial information remains withheld, and how diasporic communities can challenge these stories.
Recent projects use slip cast moldmaking, image transfer, and installation to consider what is lost and gained in acts of transformation, translation, and abstraction. Some artworks play with simulacrum— such as piles of ceramic fruit that serve as offerings on an altar-like construction, but remain eternally ripe and never rotting, inviting contemplation on impermanence and the boundaries of passing, queerness, and perceptions of reality. Other objects offer narratives— such as ceramic pig heads that explore how colonial occupation altered food histories of Filipino dishes, like sisig. Using creative-fictional poetics to offer fragments of personal stories within collective diasporic histories, Gunn's own family history becomes the lens through which they explore broader questions of invisibility, silence, and who decides settled history.
Originally from Baltimore, Cat Gunn (b. 1993, Honolulu, HI) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans imagemaking, installation, sculpture, ceramics, painting, and drawing. Using deconstructed altars, archival sites, and domestic spaces as a site of investigation, Gunn stages arrangements of ceramic sculptures, images, plants, found objects, and material experiments. These works interrogate how objects mediate relationships and memories. Working to honor their own Filipinx heritage they have reclaimed through their research, they also evaluate the colonial relationship and imperial impacts of the US occupation of the Philippines from 1898-1946. With the use of historical Filipino archives and a modest familial archive, their work offers a portal where divergent timelines can intersect, dreaming of what was, what could have been, and what will be.
Gunn received their MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego, where they expanded their practice into the realms of ceramics, sculpture, and installation. They received their MA in Professional Studies (Art History Concentration) and BFA in Painting from Towson University. Gunn has had their work included in recent group exhibitions at ICA in San Diego, Vielmetter in Los Angeles, and BEST PRACTICE in San Diego among others. Gunn also co-founded Harvest & Gather, an experimental, nomadic curatorial project run in San Diego with collaborator and friend, mika Castañeda.
www.catgunn.com
@mango__hot__sauce
mika Castañeda, b. 1996 Los Angeles California.
Castañeda, a socially motivated artist, explores the critical relationships between memory, gathering, and critical forms of heldness in a practice that examines the social and political effects of one's proximity to others. By creating interdisciplinarily, sometimes sound, images, installations, or social sculptures, Castaneda’s practice questions the boundaries and hierarchies that rule over these domains. Fascinated by our relationship to objects, archive and social spaces, Castaneda’s practice involves the collecting, arranging, and combining of various momentos from time spent with community. The resulting works can include everything from blurry photographs, to bits of confetti, popcorn, candy wrappers, birthday cards, or the dust from their home. Almost everything is a fragment of themself or someone else, Castaneda considers an inclination toward accumulation, creating works that are both intimate reflections of community and excavations of how cultural value is assigned and upheld through what surrounds us. They expand communal/personal range and interest within their work, often building participatory events or participatory practices that build on both collective and autonomous observations, experiences, and interpretations of community.
Castañeda has explored promises of social responsibility and proximity through queer social spaces, nightclubs to dive bars, AA meetings to house parties, always keeping a record of how we might consider our realities through coalition and actual traces of life. Castaneda has staged works and interventions in various institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Soho Warehouse, combining archival material and their own artifacts to examine the aesthetics of display, social spaces, and home decor and to highlight the contrasting acts of care, control, exchange, and labor within totalitarian institutions.
UPCOMING
Noé Olivas
September 12 - October 17, 2026
Jertsin Crosby & Tara Merenda Nelson
curated by Joshua Tonies
November 14 - December 19, 2026
Ghost Agency (Anni Garza Lau + Gro Sarauw)
curated by Doreen Rios
February 13 - March 20, 2027
1955 Julian Avenue
San Diego, CA 92113
map
25th/Commercial on the Orange Line
Barrio Logan on the Blue Line
Gallery hours (during exhibitions):
Tuesday - Sunday
11am - 4pm