The sun rose on A Butterfly is Patient* on 27th March, at Great Northwest in San Juan, La Union. Named after a children’s storybook Zeus Bascon discovered by accident, in the hands of a young family of four (now a family of five at the time of writing), it is a story of a queer body unfolding from its interior world. It is also a story of patience, of constellating signs and symbols, and waiting for stars to align at the right time to unravel the self.
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| Photo courtesy of Colin Dancel |
This was what Zeus undertook at his Emerging Islands residency. The artist now considers the four weeks of studio time he spent in preparation for his exhibit a period of cultivation, of a garden where he, with new iterations of past work, compelled his process forward through deep and personal interactions with members of the community. This is not atypical for Zeus, who likens his larger process to setting a stage for a play, only each actor and act, in this play, is a flower in bloom in his garden of self-exploration.
From the many objects and studio material he brought from his home in Laguna to La Union, Zeus decided to begin his story with his Dead Mask series, which he started at his Koganecho Bazaar Fictive Communities residency in Yokohama, Japan in 2014. Not surprisingly for someone entering a strange new place, he began with a form that, by design, reveals strangeness as much as it conceals. The masks are markers of personal memory, but are also artifacts that carry his feeling (e.g. joy, sorrow, anxiety); and so as springboards for the many collaborations he had endeavored to stage his play, they allowed his feelings to itinerate across people, as affect carried over to whomever was wearing his masks. Like cross-pollination.
The cross-pollination began almost instantly, at a workshop series co-instigated by the residency with a local Ecology teacher, attended by members of the environmental student organization Lupon ng mga Indibidwal na Nangangalaga ng Kalikasan (LINK). Here, Zeus took the students through a speech-drawing-movement (translation-transformation-transmutation) workshop that had them identifying personal thoughts and feelings as words, threading those same words through a gestural line drawing activity, and finally into a movement exercise where each student wore a mask, and performed their own sequences of words. Here they were also entreated to perform in front of a painting Zeus created to simulate “a portal into himself”, and a costume as intermediary vessel.
While the workshop fulfilled its intent to teach students the joys of introspection, it invariably laid the groundwork for a future work to blossom. Piecing twelve words together from the 12 participants’ performances, Zeus composed a poem that would later on become the prompt for a new work.
Rest Unknown Love
Stop Continue Stop
Love Alone Butterfly
Impact Selfless Attention
Other times, Zeus would kowtow to the constellations of fate, and align his stage-setting around opportunities that would present themselves to him by happenstance. After having ruminated on an older work from a previous coastal residency - a blue painting with stars glistening over a body of water - he accidentally found his setting during a no-work beach incursion with the rest of the residents, to Darigayos, in Luna, La Union, where he caught a glimpse of the same, starry horizon. This scene inevitably became the setting for Frenzy, a collaborative piece with dancer Mia Cabalfin. With a tarot card reading as prompt - something the artist often employs as a participatory method - he succumbed to codified arcana this time, to allow the fateful setting to seep through the performance on its own. Mia picked four cards, and as he read them out the dancer responded with a flurry of motion almost errant in nature. With her vision concealed and donning a costume by Zeus, the dancer motioned restlessly as if to break free. Much later, while poking around literature to make more sense of the drawn cards, he stumbled upon a familiar word -frenzy.
Referencing a found painting of a girl staring at a horizon, he began work with Carla Teng and Victoria Keet, whom he had met through friends in La Union. Having had them don an iteration of the same masks (now in harness form) used in a previous work, Syokoy, the women engaged in a series of word exchanges with the artist after each drawing a tarot card, while they each stare into their respective sunrise (Clear Break with Victoria) and sundown (Insomnia with Carla). While these experiences were entirely their own (these are the women’s meditations, not his), Zeus figured into the setting the way he often does - as a spectral figure manifesting in emotional armor (harness) fashioned out of his feelings.
Sunny Day, fashioned out of studio material and many objects gathered throughout his residency, was a diorama of his life in La Union, and a meditation on all the feelings and experiences he gathered throughout his stay. Through this work he staked the importance of experience, claiming that the act of “keeping the objects close is what was most important”. The objects laid out on this painting of water, land and the sun, were, to note: stones and shells bestowed by Zola and Mowan, two of his closest friends in La Union and children of co-residents Cian Dayrit and Veronica Lazo, cocktail parasols nabbed from glasses at drinks with friends, tambo grass gathered on the way home from a failed trip to Tangadan Falls, a ceramic bowl with a mandala-esque pattern signifying his own portal, positioned on top of the sun on the horizontal painting, and a right-handed clay figure which he associates with the power to decide, deployed at many instances. All these memories compound to form what to the artist feels like a fantasy. Too much feeling, swelling through. Like when one stares at the sun on a sunny day and the eyes warm and tears start to form, he asks - is this real? He tempers this feeling by placing sand on top of the diorama, like grit bearing down on beauty, as a means to conceal emotions that are ultimately too personal for him to reveal. In later interviews, he would consign to the same feelings about the residency as a whole - that it was, after all, a fantasy project. He set out to stage a play and that, he did. While sands might typically connote a fleeting moment, it seems the fantasy project was meant to root him in reality after all.
The curtains closed for his show on April 25, 2021. The last work to be taken down, anuntitled mural of Dead Masks hung to the figure of a butterfly, and the final and only ephemeral work in the exhibit, was an illustration of his self with various masks portraying divergent feelings of joy and sorrow, anxiety and hope, turbulence and calm. Here was where the title of his exhibit truly manifested, as he imagines the butterfly mural to be “everyone” - a testament to how the artist typically attempts to reveal realities rooted in his self through his work, in the hopes that they reveal as truths to others. And the truth is his to share, mediated by personal experience, all lessons for how to be a butterfly in his sense of the word, summed up in a children’s book:
A butterfly is patient.
A butterfly is creative.
A butterfly is helpful.
A butterfly is protective.
A butterfly is poisonous.
A butterfly is spectacular!
A butterfly is thirsty.
A butterfly is big…
A butterfly is scaly.
A butterfly is not a moth!
A butterfly is a traveller.
A butterfly is magical.
A butterfly is patient…
To soar!**
- David Loughran
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*Aston & Long, Chronicle Books LLC, 2011
**All pages of the book, A Butterfly is Patient, summarized.
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