Free As a Bird
By Gig Depio
It sure feels good to be “free.” After more than three months, we’re finally crawling out from our caves.
It feels a bit strange though, being a painter, since I’m used to the isolation, doing most of my work alone in the studio. Yet, for whatever reason, there is a comfort in knowing that consumerism is coming back to life, churning the engines once again in relentless pursuit of this thing we call “economic progress” right where we left off last March.
In early 2019, Darren Johnson and I had a two-man exhibition, “Birds of NV” at the Priscilla Fowler Gallery in downtown Las Vegas. Some of the ideas in the exhibition were inspired by the relationships we’ve formed within the community, especially from our experiences throughout the years bringing people together through the arts, spearheaded by Patrick Gaffey and Michael Ogilvie at the Winchester Cultural Center. For us, birds are metaphors for movements of people in pursuit of greener pastures, migrations that spur new relationships, creating points of convergence within a diversity of cultures.
On the other hand, some of my paintings depict Canada Geese and other migrating birds settling on landfills, where generations of them feed and breed on human refuse all year long — and worse their offspring are oblivious to a much bigger world that exists beyond the horizon of their wasteland. In the book Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams writes: “For the past few years... I seem to be relegated to the landfill. As far as birding goes, there’s often no place better... Our urban wastelands are becoming wildlife’s last stand. The great frontier. We’ve moved them out of town like all other ‘low-income tenants.’”
Image/Gig Depio. Giardini, 36” x 36”, Oil on Panel, 2016.
The COVID-19 pandemic has indeed painted a bleak picture of our future in the arts, a feeling of dystopia with no land under our feet nor a culture that anchors us to anywhere, as Bruno Latour would put it. Even with the recent reopening of businesses, the arts remain mostly shutdown and barely supported.
But in spite of this “flattening” of the art world, I believe there is a glimmer of hope. In A Defence of Poetry, Percy Shelley argues that humans are like Aeolian harps, “vibrating” with the same frequency as the world around and within us. Timothy Morton adds that this vibration is an attunement, rendering oneself sensitive enough to phenomena with this attitude of “openness” to the world, as we know it, that passes through our consciousness vicariously through our senses. The last three months was a pause, a period of reflection and a small window of opportunity for us “subjects of the arts” to reset things, reorganize into a consolidated collective and nudge ourselves onto a new trajectory.
Back in the landfills, Williams writes: “The symmetry of starling flocks... they wheel and turn, twist and glide, with no apparent leader. They are the collective. A flight of frenzy... I watch them above the dump, expanding and contracting along the meridian of a winged universe.”
Image/Gig Depio. Not So Koi, 144” x 144” (Diptych), Oil on Canvas, 2016.
Las Vegas-based Filipino painter Gig Depio presents the conjunctions of contemporary and historical forces in the form of intense, often large-scale, figurative compositions. Depio’s body of work focuses on American culture and its history, the exploration of the unfamiliar west and later expansion and influence across the globe, especially on the convergence of American, Philippine, and Spanish histories at the turn of the 20th century, and the inevitable interweaving of many different cultures from then on. His individual paintings depict particular political and cultural events in points of time and geographical space in history, but his body of work seen as a whole encapsulates a much bigger picture of how our ideologies and resulting collective human endeavors have directly affected every aspect of our environment in the age of the Anthropocene.
Recipient of the 2016 Nevada Arts Council Fellowship Grant in Painting, he has exhibited across Nevada, with shows at the Nevada Museum of Art, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, the University of Nevada in Reno, and the Clark County Winchester Cultural Center Gallery, Las Vegas, among others. Depio has been an exponent for public, non-profit and independent art in Nevada since 2009, and has recently extended his advocacy internationally, including exhibitions with the National Commission for Culture and Arts (NCCA), Manila, Philippines in 2018, and in 2019 at the 58th Venice Biennale, Giudecca Art District (GAD), Venice, Italy, and at Three Works Gallery in Scarborough, Yorkshire, United Kingdom.
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