Gap Year
Buttery-Ball, 16” x 21”, Oil on Canvas, 2018. Art/Gig Depio.
By Gig Depio
The Second Coming of Ozzy
No, not Ozzy Ozbourne, but Ozzy, as in Ozymandias, the Greek name for Rameses II of Egypt.
During the pandemic, alone at home and in the studio struggling to finish some work, music and poetry were some of the little things that helped me to get through those days. The best ones have a way of being elusive and ambiguous with ideas, and yet also miraculously still find a way to convey some “clarity” for the soul in the same way paintings do.
And so, sometime last March, I came across something I had read back in my college days — Percy Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. It was an odd feeling reading it again in this time and place, a poem written and published more than 200 years ago in 1818. His words and sentiments couldn’t have been more prescient and relevant to our collective grief and despair during this pandemic’s “end of days.”
Shelley writes:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
And it’s not a coincidence that a hundred years later after Ozymandias, another poet, W.B. Yeats, publishes his own poem in 1919, “The Second Coming.” As if in response to Shelley, he writes, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…”, and he continues:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
A hundred more years later in 2020, here I am in Las Vegas reading both poems during one of the bleakest moments of my life. Is he talking about us? Ha, maybe — probably not! I couldn’t help but burst out both in laughter and in tears. And at the same time think about our beautiful city: an artificial oasis in the middle of a vast dry desert pocked by permanent scars of atomic testing, a Luxor Sphinx in the middle of The Strip, and a matching statue of Rameses II to go with it. Not to mention a variety of our very own “indignant desert birds” whose habitats have been destroyed by the over-expansion of the suburban sprawl. It all sounds so familiar, a recurring tale that predates Schumpeter’s gale by centuries. Talk about coincidences!
So here we are deep in the middle of a global pandemic, while our “great” nations of the world hunker down to the ground. Who would’ve thought that such minuscule objects of nature, tiny specks of COVID-19 particles (whose entire global material existence could fit inside a soda can) could bring us so much misery? And cause us to question our very existence, our very place in the scheme of things? So much for the intellect and wealth of mankind and the greatness of our mighty armies.
“We’ve got this!” — it’s what the exactness of science and knowledge (and capital) dictates. Indeed, this hubris of postmodern anthropocentrism has given us a taste of the “second coming” (of Copernicus maybe?). I believe a little bit of humility is long overdue.
*********
A Little Bit of Grief Won’t Hurt Ya, So They Say
“We will have a pandemic every 10 years,” according to Norway’s Minister of Health Bent Høie. It’s highly unlikely though. Based on historical data, pandemics are more likely to haunt us every 30 years on average. But if you include other disasters into the mix, such as a market crash, environmental disasters, or socio-political disruptions, then a 10-year cycle for disasters might hold true. It goes without saying that with every “advance,” comes an equal and opposite force — Newton’s Third Law in physics. It seems these sorts of “corrections” may hold true for economics, politics, and in culture as well. We’ll see.
Last March, my stepson got into a tragic motorcycle accident. He had fractured his spine in four places and had to undergo a series of complicated surgical procedures to stabilize it. A few years ago, he had moved back to the Philippines to take a breather after his stint in Afghanistan with the US Army. So there we were, sitting by the dinner table in total disbelief, unable to digest the unbearable grief of this tragedy. We agreed that my wife would have to take the next flight out and be there for him. There was some mention of a possible COVID-19 outbreak in the news, but we were all in denial about it. So on March 8, my wife flew to Manila for a month long emergency visit, oblivious and totally unprepared for a series of other tragic events to come.
For weeks, my wife had literally lived inside the Medical City, a state-of-the-art hospital at the heart of metro Manila, with a built-in hotel for family members and caretakers of patients. My stepson had been unconscious for days in the ICU when the news of a nationwide lockdown hit. I remember my wife telling me on the phone that she could see the empty streets and highways from the hospital windows. There were rumors circling on social media that President Duterte had considered declaring martial law. It suddenly reminded me of my dad’s stories of a dark history in the Philippines when Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972, which lasted through 1981.
Will there be a military take over? Lawlessness? Will my wife be able to come safely back home anytime soon?
There was strictly no traveling between cities and they had locked down public access to the hospital itself. My wife couldn’t leave because they’d never let her back inside. At some point, an entire section of the hospital was flooded with critical-stage COVID-19 patients, and later this included the ICU itself where my stepson was staying. Patients and staff were starting to get sick across departments of the hospital. Eventually, my stepson tested positive for COVID-19, it was inevitable. He was still unconscious when a persistent high fever set in. A couple of days later, they had to put him on a ventilator. There were reports of daily deaths across hospitals nationwide, including some news of friends and relatives succumbing to the virus.
My wife had tested negative so far for antibodies with an unreliable rapid test, but she said she had felt some symptoms developing. My stepdaughter who had visited the hospital early on, started getting symptoms as well, even though her rapid antibody test indicated negative and her MRI only indicated pneumonia. She rushed herself into the Makati Medical Center in April, after noticing that she had lost her sense of smell and taste. Thankfully, a few weeks later, both my stepson and stepdaughter eventually fully recovered from COVID-19.
Months later, as things were getting better, and the national government began easing travel restrictions, my wife started having breathing difficulties. In September, she was admitted into the COVID-19 ward at the Makati Medical Center, most likely contracting the virus a second time.
Meanwhile, back in Vegas, I was so worried that my son might have been exposed to the virus at his work. He had been working the redeye shift full time at the Returns Department of one of the Amazon warehouses on the east side of Vegas. He was at the facility 10 hours a day for months, processing thousands of returned-item packages from all over, along with hundreds of other employees in the same space. He told me there had been rumors of a handful of people everyday being discharged from their duties at work due to COVID-19.
One day he came back home with the sniffles, and later turned into an asthma attack for a couple of days. No fever, no other symptoms, but no available COVID-19 testing in Nevada at the time either. Did he have COVID-19? Did I get it too? I felt a mild sore throat developing and suddenly felt so helpless, my state-of-mind sinking down in total hopelessness. I seriously thought to myself, this might be it for all of us. Is this how it will end?
****
Lotus-Eaters
There’s nothing more disruptive than the seductive world of social-media. Since the beginning of the shutdown, I hadn’t really been feeling the FB or IG vibe. So one day out of sheer boredom, I finally decided to try out this app everyone was talking about called TikTok. I know, I know, too late for me, I’m too old for this stuff, but I was curious. What’s more awkward than to watch an endless stream of videos of people with their arms up in the air, hips swaying, and trying (and some failing) to dance to the tune of Savage Love? Maybe it’s the awkwardness that’s the draw? Or maybe it’s the allure of Narcissus’ bliss seeing ourselves in that utopian dream — an attempt to escape our woes and miseries. Did I get addicted? Maybe. I guess we’re pretty much the modern day lotus-eaters.
Sometime last May, I was flipping through a stream of funny amateur videos, including some clips of a toddler named Boss Baby Brody singing Maniac while out-dancing Jennifer Beals. And then, boom — all of a sudden, a series of disturbing videos appeared on my feed out of nowhere: hundreds of protesters rioting on the streets of major cities throughout the nation, blaring sirens and flashing lights, cop cars burning, peaceful protesters being bashed on their bloody heads, and rioters looting stores and burning buildings. The next few days were surreal, the same violence was happening everywhere, including here in Vegas. A level of public disorder had been normalized throughout the pandemic year of 2020. Here I was, trying to cope with all this anxiety with an attitude of pessimism and paranoia never seen before. Maybe it was time to delete the app.
Luckily, I still had some friends who’d call once in a while to check in to see if I was doing okay. Such a priceless thing to have, friends within the community who’d pull us back into the fold. We reach out, they reach out, we all pay it forward, there’s no way we can deal with any of this in isolation. Maybe this “gap year” was a chance for us to retreat from the front lines and rethink what it means for all of us to work together as a collective, in spite of our differences.
******
Ice Plants
Finally, things are looking up. My wife has been back home since December 20, the step-kids in Manila have long recovered from COVID-19, and my mom and stepdad have gotten their vaccinations in downtown Vegas. I haven’t really been out enough to get a better feel of the situation in southern Nevada. We’ve been busy at home doing a whole lot of cleaning up and other maintenance stuff after living like bachelors for more than nine months.
One of the things we had to do was yard work. Several years ago, we had picked up a handful of ice plant scraps and trimmings from the garden across the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Barrick Museum of Art and had replanted them around our home. These resilient beautiful succulents crawl over the desert soil and provide a low-maintenance ground-cover that requires very little water. And in the spring they produce beautiful tulip-like flowers for the bees.
They are all over our property now, and since we hadn’t done any yard maintenance for the year, we had to deal with a whole lot of overgrowth around the pomegranates and pine trees, the lemongrass, shrubs, and walkways. Literally, half our yard was covered in a sprawling green carpet of ice plants.
Over the years, we’ve tried cultivating and rebuilding the top soil of our backyard garden but every summer the extreme heat and dry climate bake everything to a crisp. But not these ice plants. After removing whole sections of overgrowth, I’ve noticed that the succulents have actually “rejuvenated” our barren grounds into a dark and rich topsoil, full of little crawling bugs and earthworms. And scattered across the area are these tiny green onion and garlic sprouts that have somehow found their way in there. Think about it, these grounds were left practically untouched for a whole year. Unbelievable, nature just being nature.
This made me think about the role of the arts and humanities in our communities, especially during this 2020 COVID-19 “gap year.” Artists were considered one of the non-essentials in society, the first of the cull in institutional support, and in state and federal budgets. We were essentially the ice plant scraps and trimmings tossed to the sidewalk gutter.
Most artists barely make enough to sustain their careers. We are outsiders, with no access to the economic benefits available only to the 1%ers of the art industry. We are volunteers, mostly doing things for free, out of our own pockets. Especially in recent years, there’s been little or no incentive to participate in the arts other than personal fulfillment and an opportunity to connect with the community. But in spite of these setbacks, here we are, artists as cultivators, we till the soil, we touch people’s lives in ways no science or language can ever imagine. We are the observers of small things and big things of the world around us, we stitch together the many and infinite ways of seeing how all these structures come together. And yet, here we are, treated as a pile of trash, an aimless mob, wriggling in a pit of discarded excess. As far as our economy and government are concerned, artists are a liability, unless we are financially useful, unless we produce an income large enough for taxes.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if this “gap year” of a pandemic would actually reboot things, systematically change our ways of thinking. I’m ready to settle for anything at all, just as long as things don’t go back to the way they were.
Photo/Gig Depio.
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, 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 he has recently extended his advocacy internationally, including exhibitions with the National Commission for Culture and Arts, Manila, Philippines in 2018, and in the 58th Venice Biennale, Giudecca Art District, Venice, Italy in 2019.
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