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.
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
MEMORY MODULE ACTIVATION: LINE OF SIGHT
Line of Sight
Curated by Jon Cuyson
Nice Buenaventura
Karl Castro
Jon Cuyson
Eric Ramos Guerrero
Galleria Duemila
6 May - June 20, 2023
Galleria Duemila presents the group exhibition Line of Sight, featuring the works of Nice Buenaventura, Karl Castro, Jon Cuyson, and Eric Ramos Guerrero. The Line of Sight or Axis Line is the imaginary line between an observer, spectator, or target. In communication, the line of sight is the direct path from a transmitter to the receiver. In this time of digitization and data accumulation, how are images and messages received and deployed when a clear line of sight is regularly obstructed and manipulated? The ability of works of art to generate nebulous concepts of affect is rooted in the contemporary understanding of the audience and the artist. An image or other visual artwork becomes an object of attention necessary for viewer engagement to produce effect. How do artists negotiate the relationship between maker and viewer? What occurs when that engagement becomes obscured? What strategies do image makers utilize to retain agency? How are subjectivity and knowledge formed without a clear line of sight?
The group exhibition brings together four artists working in diverse media but connected by their interest in the intersection of history and visual culture. Accessing personal and collective memory, they bring complex underrepresented narratives relating to their biography and contemporary socio-political concerns. The artist and curator, Jon Cuyson initiated the underlying idea of the group’s intersecting reflections. The exhibition opens on May 6 and continues until June 20, 2023.
Galleria Duemila is at 201 Loring Street 1300 Pasay City, Manila, Philippines. Online reservations can be made via www.galleriaduemila.com with telephone numbers +63288319990 & +639276294612.
MEMORY MODULE: SOS
SOS situates itself within Jon Cuyson’s ongoing investigation of abstraction, horizontality, and maritime narratives, operating at the intersection of painting, installation, and moving image. Presented at Galleria Duemila, the works deploy repetitive layering, mark-making, and geometric abstraction to construct surfaces that both recede and advance, articulating tensions between presence and absence, stability and flux. Horizontality emerges as a formal and conceptual strategy, functioning as a resistant counterpoint to vertical hierarchies and normative structures, while simultaneously indexing temporality, labor, and affective experience.
The module’s titular reference to the maritime distress signal, SOS (Save Our Ship, Save Our Souls) , operates as both semiotic and metaphoric anchor, situating the abstract compositions within histories of maritime labor, human vulnerability, and ecological precarity. Through the juxtaposition of layered acrylic surfaces, collaged elements, and video imagery of the sea and dripping paint, Cuyson’s work enacts a poetics of memory and contingency, rendering abstraction as a site of contemplative engagement.
SOS exemplifies the conceptual logic of the Memory Module framework: each gesture, medium, and temporal interval functions rhizomatically, generating relational links across projects while mediating between interior and exterior registers of experience. The module thus operates simultaneously as an aesthetic object, a site of critical reflection, and a contemplative archive of human and ecological entanglements.
2022 / Galleria Duemila / Philippines
HEAVY ROTATIONS
Whatever does the archival mean, and how can one think of the archive beyond the (imagined) spaces of climate-controlled vaults and dusty libraries? Through the works of artists Jon Cuyson, Moe Myat May Zarchi and Miti Ruangkritya, the exhibition Heavy Rotations explores larger questions of how historical consciousness, social memories and private accounts are shaped and created in contemporary Southeast Asia. These lines of inquiry endeavour to propose a new vocabulary for rethinking the archive in this age of hyper-networked digital media.
A reference to a practice in the radio broadcast industry—where stations maintain a list of songs that get the most airplay to play throughout the day—the exhibition title parallels the processes by which archival images have been adapted, remixed, and propagated to speculate on the possibilities of collective narratives, past and present.
This exhibition is co-curated with the Moving Picture Experiment Group (MPEG), an itinerant curatorial and research collective exploring the polyvalency of the moving image medium in contemporary practices across Asia. MPEG seeks to investigate and instigate hybridised modes of image-making, and is initiated and led by artists Alfonse Chiu, Adar Ng and Dave Lim.
2022 / Esplanade / Singapore
MODULE: SEA OF SILENCE
SEA OF SILENCE is an experimental documentary-fiction that probes the liminal spaces between presence and absence, life and death, through the reworking of memory and archival trace. By weaving archival photos, found footage, and speculative imagery, the film interrogates colonial and labor histories while exploring the entanglements of human and nonhuman actors across land and sea.
Framed by queer ecologies and wet ontologies, the archive becomes a porous, mutable space where subjectivities are unsettled and reassembled. Labor, containment, and mobility are reconsidered within both terrestrial and oceanic realms, revealing the negotiation between freedom, constraint, and survival. In its interplay of memory, materiality, and speculative narration, SEA OF SILENCE invites reflection on histories that are simultaneously personal, collective, and ecological, proposing alternative temporalities and relationalities that emerge from the depths of past and present.
Synopsis: A silent yet omniscient voice drifts across time, searching the past to uncover hidden currents of memory and belonging. Through fragments of stories and forgotten histories, it traces intimate connections between family, labor, colonialism, and the sea , a vast, living archive that binds them all. The narrative moves fluidly between personal and collective memory, revealing how migration, maritime toil, and ancestral longing are entangled with the forces of empire and environmental change. Within this shifting seascape, the sea becomes both witness and participant, carrying with it the weight of untold desires, ruptures, and returns.
Digital Video (Black and White finish)
13'30"
2021
