MEMORY MODULE: BREAKING THE WAVES
In Breaking the Waves, I approach abstraction as a site where memory, labor, and ecological entanglement converge. Using a roller brush—a gesture rooted in my practice since 2010, I build horizontal movements in muted tones that evoke sediment, tidal rhythms, and temporal drift. Water operates both materially and conceptually, carrying the paint across the surface while signaling transition, dislocation, and return.
Traces of slowness and repetition remain visible. Evaporation, gravity, and air shape the paintings as paint settles like silt, forming quiet accumulations of gesture and time. The body moves across the canvas in continuous, single-take actions, embracing irreversibility and chance as part of the work’s formation.
Discreet incorporations of cast resin mussels and shells interrupt the flatness of the surface, transforming the paintings into hybrid objects where image becomes material. These elements extend the work’s ecological register, introducing interdependence between the organic and the synthetic, the human and the nonhuman, and unsettling the purity associated with modernist abstraction.
Water remains central, as life source, migration route, and archive of loss. While the paintings may recall minimalist austerity from a distance, up close they reveal dense, affective surfaces marked by rupture and contingency. Here, abstraction resists detachment, inviting a slower form of looking attuned to fragments, thresholds, and what quietly persists beneath the surface.
2025 / West Gallery / Philippines
Some canvases in Breaking the Waves incorporate resin-cast shells, mussels, artists mandibles, and fragments of marine debris, embedded directly onto the painted surface. These interruptions transform the works from two-dimensional gesture into hybrid, sedimentary forms. The cast materials suggest remnants of shorelines or bodies washed ashore, shifting the paintings into sculptural terrain. These assemblages highlight the tension between fluid gesture and encrusted matter, evoking ecological accumulation and queer embodiment. Abstraction, here, becomes entangled with the physical world, holding memory, excess, and material transformation in fragile suspension.
MEMORY MODULE: HOLE IN THE WATER
Hole in the Water is an ongoing artist book series that fuses archival, found, and personally taken photographs into a fragmented, fluid narrative. At its core is the motif of a black hole—an orifice or opening that operates as both void and passage. This “hole” moves across registers of meaning, from absence and erasure to the queering of space, evoking intimacy, anonymity, and desire within the contexts of maritime labor, historical memory, and geopolitical tension.
The book weaves together images of Filipino seafarers at work, archival queer photographs of sailors, and scenes of conflict at sea, including tensions between Filipino fishermen and Chinese vessels. These are layered with images of Chinese scholarly rocks, creating a porous visual field where geology, history, and identity converge. Each photograph functions as a threshold where intimacy and labor, politics and desire intersect.
Informed by queer temporality and the precarities of life at sea, Hole in the Water unsettles dominant maritime narratives. Mussel Thinking subtly informs the work, shaping how images accumulate, filter, and sediment meaning over time. Resisting mastery and fixed representation, the book 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?
TAONG DAGAT continues my investigation of the sea as both a symbol of the sublime and a mirror of the self, reflecting intertwined histories of labor, identity, and ecological entanglement. Using memory and horizontality as forms of resistance, the exhibition asks how these lingering histories shape our understanding of belonging, movement, and care.
Extending the fictional character of Kerel, introduced in 2013, this module situates the queer Filipino time-traveling seafarer within maritime narratives long framed by normative masculine perspectives. Through Kerel, the exhibition reclaims these spaces to foreground multiplicity, fluidity, and unseen identities, constructing alternative accounts of maritime labor, queerness, diaspora, and postcolonial encounter.
Employing abstraction, minimalism, painting, sculpture, installation, and film, the works merge personal, collective, and ecological histories. Mussel Thinking subtly informs the methodology: resin-cast mussels act as ecological collaborators, evoking cycles of filtration, survival, and interdependence. They articulate porous relations between bodies, objects, and environments, translating material strategies into gestures of care and resilience.
The SOS series, alongside related paintings and films, reflects on the sea’s dual role as both source of life and site of vulnerability. Drawing from wet ontologies, the project attends to the fluidity and entanglement of human and more-than-human life. By weaving together queer narratives, ecological awareness, and historical memory, TAONG DAGAT positions art as an inclusionary space where the sea’s shifting currents can be navigated, questioned, and reimagined.
2024 / Vargas Museum / Philippines
https://coverstory.ph/sea-people-and-their-buoyant-ontology/
Untitled SOS Movement #17 unfolds as a spatial constellation where fragments gather into a quiet, tidal arrangement. Composed of canvas-on-plywood panels, resin casts of mussels and branches, coconuts, jasper stones, aluminum sheets, water containers, a handtruck, mobile devices, and a guitar, the installation hovers between sculpture and site. It operates simultaneously as ship, archaeological field, and open archive, where the detritus of seafaring life appears as if retrieved from a submerged world.
Mussel Thinking quietly informs the work’s structure. Resin mussels act less as symbols than as agents of relation, suggesting cycles of filtration, care, and survival. The installation functions as a porous system in which materials, memories, and ecologies circulate without settling into fixed form. Certain objects index process and memory: a used roller brush bearing traces of the paintings in this exhibition, and a guitar that first appeared in the film Wet Dreams, presented concurrently in TAONG DAGAT. These gestures fold production, performance, and personal history into the work, blurring distinctions between making and remembering.
Drawing on Neferti Tadiar’s notion of “remaindered life,” the installation transforms overlooked materials into an affective archive. It invites viewers to navigate shifting relations between objects, bodies, and the restless waters that bind them.
Title: Untitled SOS Movement #17 ( site specific floor installation)
Medium: canvas on plywood, acrylic stands, water containers, guitar, handtruck, ( branches & mussels) resin sculptures, iPad, iPhone, lube, coconuts, jasper stones, ceramic bowl, aluminum sheet, aluminum bars, Datu Puti vinegar, used paint roller, museum paint tray, and cargo straps
Size: variable dimensions
Year: 2024
This site-activated installation for TAONG DAGAT reimagines the maritime chain through soft sculpture, transforming a symbol of strength, industry, and control into one of vulnerability, permeability, and fluid entanglement. Suspended from the museum ceiling, oversized links made of hand-sewn raw canvas intertwine with seafarers’ overalls and transparent bags containing hybrid objects: shells, wigs, lubricant, slippers, gloves, safety glasses, and “Good Morning” towels. These fragments evoke traces of maritime labor, queer identity, and hidden intimacies, assembling an affective archive of bodies, histories, and desires entangled with the sea. Here, Mussel Thinking emerges not as a literal material gesture but as a conceptual framework. Like mussels filtering the ocean, the installation reflects on how histories, desires, and ecological narratives pass through and cling to objects, bodies, and spaces. It proposes a way of thinking with porousness and interdependence, where meaning is not fixed but continuously circulating, absorbed, sifted, and reimagined.
By subverting material expectations and layering personal, industrial, and ecological artifacts, the installation transforms the chain into a metaphor for relational strength, where connection replaces control. Grounded in queer ecologies and wet ontologies, it invites viewers to inhabit a shifting landscape where the boundaries between human and nonhuman, functional and affective, dissolve, an oceanic space where memory sedimentates, intimacy drifts, and survival persists through entanglement and care
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 silent, double-channel experimental film following Kerel, a recurring fictional persona of a queer Filipino sailor, as he strums a guitar atop a rock in the open sea. The black-and-white imagery drifts between dream, memory, and premonition, evoking the mutable nature of maritime space and queer temporality.
The film interlaces original footage with archival materials, including scenes from Badjao (1957) and early maritime documentaries. These fragments converge with surreal sequences: Kerel floating amid submerged plants, mirrored seascapes, shipwrecks, and coral reefs. Guided by Mussel Thinking, the film treats each element as a filtering agent, a site that accumulates, holds, and transmits traces of labor, memory, and ecological resonance, allowing histories, affects, and material presences to cluster like mussels on a rock.
Political rupture enters through found footage of Chinese patrol boats harassing Filipino fishermen, revealing geopolitical fault lines of maritime sovereignty. The narrative then drifts into a mystical cave, zooming into microorganisms, suggesting an ontological meditation on life’s entanglements.
The film concludes with the mirrored image of a solitary seafarer’s helmet marooned on a rock, poised between disappearance and witness. Through archival layering, experimental montage, and Mussel Thinking, Wet Dreams continues my exploration of the sea as a queer, ecological threshold, where soundless gestures, sedimented histories, and ephemeral presences demand attentive, relational, and multispecies modes of sensing and imagining.
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
Encounters of Disbelief brings together the works of Jon Cuyson, Lizza May David, and Kat Medina, three artists whose practices move fluidly across painting, sculpture, and installation. The exhibition considers what happens when artworks meet viewers in moments of uncertainty, where recognition fails, and something else, stranger and transformative, emerges.
The title refers to the encounter in art and the “multiple becoming” described by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who spoke of “thought compelled by the encounter”, where an event interrupts habitual perception, forcing us to think differently. Here, the encounter is imagined as a tidal moment, where perception itself is unsettled, carried into new currents of movement and transformation.
Guided by a methodology akin to Mussel Thinking, the curatorial approach treats the exhibition as a porous ecology. Like mussels filtering water, the artworks absorb, sift, and release fragments of memory, intimacy, and history into the space. Meanings cling and drift, forming temporary attachments before dispersing again. This methodology positions each work as an affective membrane, open to interdependence, where care and relation become central to the act of making and viewing. Whether installed on the wall or the floor, or mediated by technological devices that obscure and reveal images, the works collectively challenge and expand the domain of painting. They question boundaries between surface and depth, color and objecthood, representation and abstraction. By queering modes of perception, the exhibition invites viewers into a space of uncertainty and contemplation, where the familiar slips away and new forms of encounter become possible.
Through abstraction and expanded painting strategies, Encounters of Disbelief provokes dialogue between artist and audience, material and idea, sensation and thought. It suggests that art’s power lies not in offering certainty, but in generating spaces where meaning remains fluid, filtering, sedimenting, and continually becoming.
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.
