MEMORY MODULES
MEMORY MODULE: BREAKING THE WAVES
Breaking the Waves continues my exploration of abstraction as a layered site of memory, labor, and ecological entanglement. The straight lines once drawn with geometric precision have softened and fragmented into horizontal gestures applied with a roller, marking intervals of time, space, and accumulated labor. Once a marker of separation, the line here becomes porous, signaling the dissolution of boundaries, between land and sea, self and other, surface and depth, and acting as a hinge between abstraction and cartography, performance and mapping, queer, affective, and ecological resonances.
Water, both symbol and substance, is central. It carries the paint, shapes the conceptual terrain, and evokes migration, transformation, and loss. Paint flows, evaporates, and settles like silt; time is made visible through layers shaped by gravity and touch. Salt, cast resin shells, and hybrid materials interrupt surfaces, creating a tension between object and illusion. The subdued palette of beige, gray, and brown, punctuated with silver, evokes sediment, drift, and reflected light, conjuring elemental textures without collapsing into representation.
The exhibition title references Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996), reframed here as a metaphor for bodily fragility and endurance amid social, historical, and natural forces. These paintings hold space for what is submerged yet resilient, vulnerable yet insistent. Ultimately, Breaking the Waves is a meditation on matter, memory, and movement, gathering the intimate and the planetary, the personal and the historical, into forms that drift, settle, and unfold over time.
2025 / West Gallery / Philippines
MEMORY MODULE: HOLE IN THE WATER
Hole in the Water is an ongoing artist book series that fuses archival, found, and personally taken photographs that are photocopied and then bound into a fragmented and fluid narrative. At the core of this work is the motif of a black hole, an orifice or opening, that functions as both a literal and metaphorical void. This "hole" suggests multiple layers of meaning, from the absence of presence to the queering of space. It evokes a queer glory hole, a symbol of intimacy, anonymity, and desire, reimagined within the context of maritime labor, historical memory, and conflict.
The book features images of Filipino seafarers at work, archival queer images of sailors in their nakedness, and scenes of geopolitical tension, such as Filipino fishermen clashing with Chinese ships. These images are interspersed with depictions of Chinese scholarly rocks, weaving a complex web of history, conflict, and identity. Each photograph functions as a portal, inviting viewers to peer through the hole—through the spaces where intimacy and labor, politics and desire, intersect.
Informed by my ongoing engagement with queer temporality and the vulnerabilities of labor at sea, Hole in the Water acts as an edited picture book that challenges conventional narratives of maritime life. The central "hole" becomes a site of exploration, beckoning us to reconsider the fragmented and interconnected nature of identity, intimacy, and memory. By aligning the queer symbolism of the glory hole with the vast, untamed sea, the book opens new spaces for reflection on desire, history, and the unseen forces that shape both personal and collective experiences. Hole iin the Water resists mastery and fixed representation. It invites viewers to linger in absence, to read through rupture, and to consider what it means to know through unknowing.
Series of 50
Photocopies , Magazine bound, 8 1/2 x 11”
2025
MEMORY MODULE: TAONG DAGAT (People of the Sea)
How do we liberate ourselves from our memories of the sea?
This exhibition continues my investigation of the sea as both a symbol of the sublime and a mirror of the self, reflecting histories of labor, identity, and ecological entanglement. Using memory and horizontality as forms of resistance, TAONG DAGAT explores how we might liberate ourselves from the historical and affective residues of the sea, asking: What can be gleaned from these lingering memories, and how might they shape our understanding of belonging, movement, and care?
Continuing the fictional character of Kerel, introduced in 2013, this module situates the queer Filipino time-traveling seafarer within maritime narratives often framed by normative masculine perspectives, reclaiming these spaces to foreground multiplicity, fluidity, and unseen identities. Through Kerel, the exhibition constructs a narrative of maritime labor aboard container ships while engaging with broader themes of queerness, diaspora, and postcolonial encounter.
Employing abstraction, minimalism, painting, sculpture, installation, and film, the works merge personal, collective, and ecological histories. The SOS series, along with related paintings and films, reflects on the intersections of the sea, identity, labor, and movement, highlighting the sea’s dual role as a source of life, inspiration, and ecological vulnerability. Material and conceptual strategies draw attention to wet ontologies, emphasizing the fluidity, interconnectedness, and permeability of human and non-human life. TAONG DAGAT celebrates the resilience, beauty, and challenges of maritime life while fostering reflection on ecological and social responsibility. By weaving together queer narratives, historical memory, and ecological awareness, the module positions art as an inclusionary space where the sea’s shifting, rhizomatic currents can be navigated, questioned, and reimagined.
2024 / Vargas Museum / Philippines
https://coverstory.ph/sea-people-and-their-buoyant-ontology/
This site activated installation for TAONG DAGAT reimagines the maritime chain through soft sculpture, transforming a symbol of strength and control into one of vulnerability and fluidity. Suspended from the ceiling of the museum, hand-sewn raw canvas links intertwine with seafarers’ overalls, transparent bags filled with hybrid objects such as shells, wigs, lubricant, slippers, gloves, safety glasses, and “Good Morning” towels, suggesting fragments of maritime labor, identity, and desire. By subverting material expectations and layering personal and industrial artifacts, the work evokes queer ecologies and the entangled intimacies of oceanic life, where bodies, histories, and objects drift between function and feeling.
Title: Untitled Sailor #19 black and gray (site specific installation)
Medium: metal hooks, fishnets, canvas (chain) soft sculpture, stuffing, plastic bags, lube, hand towel, canvas jumpsuits with grommets, safely helmet, plastic net, and cargo straps
Size: variable dimensions
Year: 2024
module: wet dreams
Wet Dreams (2024) is a black-and-white silent short film written and directed by Jon Cuyson, featuring Kerel, the artist’s recurring fictional figure of a queer Filipino seafarer and time-traveler, perched on coastal rocks, playing guitar while gazing into the horizon. The film unfolds as a layered visual tapestry, weaving original footage with found and archival material, excerpts from Lamberto V. Avellana’s Badjao (1954), and news coverage of confrontations between Filipino fishermen and Chinese naval patrols in the West Philippine Sea.
Moving between the intimate and the geopolitical, Wet Dreams reframes the sea as a contested archive of desire, conflict, and ecological precarity. Kerel’s solitary presence against the vast seascape becomes a lens for exploring queer longing, diaspora, and the temporal instability of maritime histories. The absence of spoken dialogue amplifies the film’s poetic and experimental approach, allowing soundless montage to operate as a form of visual attunement.
In its final act, the film ruptures narrative expectation: Kerel’s floating body folds inward, dissolving into molecular imagery and cosmic streaming. This hallucinatory sequence collapses the boundaries between body, ocean, and universe, suggesting a posthuman continuum that questions the nature of being itself. Here, water is not backdrop but collaborator, an unstable medium through which identity, history, and matter are remade. Wet Dreams extends Cuyson’s multidisciplinary practice into moving image, aligning with his ongoing exploration of queer ecologies, postcolonial maritime histories, and experimental forms of storytelling. It resists linear time, embracing instead the oceanic drift of memory, migration, and transformation.
Title: Wet Dreams
Medium: Digital Video (black and white finish)
Length: looped
Year: 2024
MODULE: GLORY
GLORY is a black-and-white animated video that unfolds as a meditative journey through shadow, matter, and memory. A lone male figure, dressed in a seafarer’s uniform and safety helmet, walks slowly through a cave-like space where maritime remnants, a stranded shipping container, suspended chains, suggest both labor and abandonment. The pace is deliberately measured, enacting a queer temporality that resists forward propulsion in favor of lingering, suspension, and drift. The ambient sounds of water, waves, dripping, echoes, evoke the sea’s haunting presence just beyond the frame, situating the cave as both shelter and threshold. As the figure moves through alternating light and darkness, the space becomes psychological as much as architectural: an interior of exile, a landscape of sedimented histories.
At the video’s center, a rupture appears, a black sphere or “hole” that interrupts the illusion of depth and perspective. Floating unanchored, it becomes a site of abstraction and disorientation, recalling both the cosmological and the erotic, a nod to queer visual culture and the symbolic force of the glory hole. This visual disruption queers space and narrative, suggesting a collapse of linear vision and a turn toward the unknowable. GLORY is both elegy and inquiry: a moving image meditation on queer seafaring, solitude, and the opaque depths of desire.
Title: Glory
Medium: 3D Animation, digital video, flatscreen monitor, and painted hand truck
Length: looped
Year: 2024
MEMORY MODULE ACTIVATION: ENCOUNTERS OF DISBELIEF
JON CUYSON
LIZZA MAY DAVID
KAT MEDINA
June 1 - June 29, 2024
ENCOUNTERS OF DISBELIEF
Galleria Duemila is pleased to present Encounters of Disbelief, featuring the works of Jon Cuyson, Lizza May David, and Kat Medina. This group exhibition combines three artists whose works oscillate between painting, sculpture, and installation. What form of experience or affect might the viewer have in encountering such works? The title refers to the encounter in art and the “multiple becoming” referred to by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In his teaching and writing, Deleuze emphasized what he called "thought compelled by the encounter." The encounter happens when it defines itself not as an internal exercise of reason but as an event that forces it to move. What form of movement and transformation occurs during the encounter?
The exhibition follows the idea of artmaking as a series of productive encounters similar to an event, a meeting, or collision between acquaintances or lovers, like two fields of force, transitory but ultimately transformative. Encounters of Disbelief is a deliberate departure from conventional modalities to challenge, to queer, and to question both viewer and maker into a space of uncertainty and contemplation. Whether installed on the walls or the floor, or using technological devices to obscure images, the works featured in the exhibition explore the expanded domain of painting by investigating color, surface, optics, and processes that explore materiality, space, structure, and objecthood from a queered lens.
Through abstraction, these artists produce works that provoke our understanding of how we might engage with art today. They use expanded painting strategies to provoke thought and engage viewers in a dialogue to express skepticism operating beyond purely formal concerns creating works that acknowledge, obfuscate, reveal, and become.
The exhibition is curated by Jon Cuyson and opens on the 1st of June, 2024 at Galleria Duemila.
MEMORY MODULE ACTIVATION: PROTECT ME FROM WHAT i WANT
BUNNY CADAG
LENA COBANGBANG
JON CUYSON
MARK SALVATUS
PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT
24 October - 16 November 2023
GALLERY 2
The arcades are a center of commerce for luxury items. In fitting them out, art enters the service of the merchant. Contemporaries never tire of admiring them, and for a long time, they remain a drawing point for foreigners. - Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project)
Underground Gallery presents a group exhibition of four artists whose practice cuts across concerns and disciplines from drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. Artists, Bunny Cadag, Lena Cobangbang, Jon Cuyson, and Mark Salvatus, will present works exploring the mall as a critical space for creation, consumption, circulation, and confusion. How do these commercial spaces shape and inform artists and vice versa? How are subjectivity and knowledge formed in predetermined spaces meant for transactional engagements? How do artists negotiate artistic production as both consumers and creators?
From the 16th century to the Victorian era, the success of commercial art galleries was made possible by an increasing number of people seeking to own objects of cultural and aesthetic value. The growth in demand for access and convenience contributed to the success of the mall culture worldwide in the 20th Century, including in Asia where the relationship between capitalism, consumerism, and cultural formation has become strongly intertwined. Particularly in the Philippines, the proliferation of malls and art galleries inside continues to be fashionable spaces created and promoted for the perceived needs of everyday life, including leisure, commerce, culture, and by default, myth-making. The exhibition title, PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT, is borrowed from American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer known for her text-based works, constructed from "truisms". Channeling its critique of power, the title could potentially suggest a philosophical and moral dilemma, from what Walter Benjamin may consider as the call for the unsettling effects of the “commodification of things” in the intimate areas of life that include the composition, dissemination, and reception of a work of art in post-materialist values.
The four artists participating in PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT, navigate the complex terrain of artistic production and consumption, actively negotiating their roles as consumers and creators. The artists engage with the varied objects, spaces, and sensory stimuli within the mall and beyond, absorbing influences and ideas that inform their creative process. Simultaneously, as creators, they challenge the established notions of consumption and commercialism through their artistic output. This ongoing negotiation between consumption and creation blurs the boundaries between personal lives and artistic practices, highlighting the porous nature of artistic inspiration.
Curated by Jon Cuyson
Underground Gallery is at Level 2, Makati Square, 2130 Don Chino Roces Avenue, Pio del Pilar, Makati City, Philippines.
MEMORY MODULE: FLOATING WITH EYES CLOSED
Floating With Eyes Closed extends Jon Cuyson’s exploration of abstraction as a site where memory, maritime narratives, and ecological entanglements converge. Through minimal acrylic paintings on raw, unprimed canvas, the works oscillate between illusion and objecthood, foregrounding material presence while opening layered subjectivities. Integrating elements such as tape, foam, louvers, tubes, and “Good Morning Towels,” Cuyson investigates intersections of labor, diaspora, and identity within broader cultural and ecological frameworks. The recurring gray “tubes” evoke ship railings, shifting between representation and abstraction, while the geometric forms referencing towels suggest intimate domestic gestures within industrial maritime settings.
The exhibition also features a raw canvas life vest, a sculptural work blurring the boundaries between painting and objecthood. Serving as both literal flotation device and metaphor for survival, it resonates with the exhibition’s title, exploring tensions between safety and vulnerability, presence and disappearance.
Operating within Cuyson’s Memory Module framework, Floating With Eyes Closed creates immersive spaces where perception, memory, and the rhythms of the sea intertwine. Abstraction here becomes a method of reconfiguring representation, charting connections between materiality, migration, and the fluid intimacies of diasporic life.
2022 / Artery Art Space / Philippines
