To Bring Forth Sweetness: A Prophet Slain

Part two of three in my series on growing up in a cult.

For further context you can read my artist statement for part one here.

Growing up in a cult can be really damaging. I struggled through many confusing and lonely times, but there was also a lot of good. Everything joyous and nurturing about my childhood was a result of my parent’s mindful parenting. The choices they made can be traced back to their experience in the cult, and their desire to give us better than they were given. Harsh parenting, high control structures, and the inability to rely on family during their upbringing manifested conversely in an environment for us of love and support, a healthy celebration of novel experiences and guilty pleasures, and a rock solid family unit that could weather any storm.

And storms we did weather. After leaving my birthplace of Brazil, we moved to Taiwan, a locale that felt far more like home to my parents who had spent so many years in Asia before I was born. My mom grew up in Macau and met my dad during his time in Japan. Two years after making the move to Taiwan, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake rocked the island, displacing us and tens of thousands of others from their homes. While staying in refugee camps, my parents, displaying a rugged resilience cultivated by the cult’s outsider status, immediately got to work lifting people’s spirits with songs, clown shows, and distributing balloons. 

Twisting balloons was a widely taught skill in the cult, both as a way of making money, and as a form of community outreach. Balloons, music, and selling literature were the primary modes of support for many large commune homes due to the cult’s restrictive policies heavily discouraging the working of regular “systemite” jobs.

Despite Asia being home in their hearts, my parents had to move us to America, to seek medical care for various health problems they were struggling with. Ever since the early days of the cult, David Berg prophesied a coming doom and destruction for America, which he styled as the whore of Babylon from Revelations 17. He preached against the relentless wars waged in foreign nations, and against the complacency of the American Evangelical churches in ignoring Jesus’s more radical teachings of asceticism and acceptance, styling himself as an iconoclast and table flipper in the image of Jesus rebuking the Pharisee establishment. I still carry these sentiments with me today.

I was fed anti-America messaging throughout publications and music which worked with the isolating, not-of-this-world lifestyle to create an identity of elite separation from the country in which we lived. This, despite the often comically rabid christian-nationalist, pro Imperialist content found in the a-Beka homeschool curriculum we used. Cognitive dissonance and lack of certainty in what I was being taught would be an ever growing thorn in my worldview throughout my time in the cult.

More important than the inconveniently present patriotism, was the lack of education about evolution in our curriculum. More than any other outside teaching, evolution was maligned as the most evil and dehumanizing work of Satan that we had to be indoctrinated against. As a supplement to the homeschooling material, we were given the Kent Hovind creationist seminars, which I, an enthusiastic student of science, practically memorized by heart. Many things could have ended up catalyzing my doubts in college, but learning about evolution from an unbiased perspective had me realizing I couldn’t rely on the trust I had in the worldview that had been forced on me, and the only way forward was to reevaluate everything from the ground up.

I wrote in the previous part in this series on the isolation and loneliness I experienced as a result of being homeschooled. The limited opportunities for socialization was made up for with an encouragement of extracurricular learning. Since an early age I was taught how to teach myself, utilizing the library system, internet forums, and pirated software. I became skilled in Photoshop, 3D modeling, music, and eventually balloons.

Balloon twisting was a skill taught to me at the age of 16 by my parents. Many ex-cult members have negative feelings about balloons due to its association with the cult, but I value the connection as the convenient illustration of the unique circumstances throughout my family history that led to me being the person I am today. A history tracing back to my great grandfather, David Berg, who got his start preaching to wayward hippies at Huntington Beach in the late 60s.

As well intentioned as the group may have started out, the radical views on sex that “Grandpa” developed, when combined with the all encompassing authoritarian nature of the cult he created, led to some truly stomach churning abuses. I was shielded by abuse in part due to the careful parenting of my parents, and due to the doctrinal overhauls that took place in previous generations after much international backlash and public scrutiny. A story of institutionalized abuse, coverup, reform, and gaslighting that I uncovered piece by piece as I was given more freedom to read the cult’s antiquated teachings.

David Berg kept his likeness hidden for much of the cult’s existence in order to evade consequences for the abuses he perpetrated and made commonplace. Only after his passing did the cult release a photo book so his many thousands of followers could finally know the leader they’d been so dedicated to. When in hiding, his appearance was substituted with a friendly and wise old anthropomorphic lion character. This is the lion I would render in balloon form, to burn the man in effigy, mixing both crucifixion and heretic-at-the-stake imagery, a fitting end to such a self-styled rebel prophet.

Out of his disemboweled corpse flows honey, like honey from the lion’s carcass that Samson would construct his riddle around. The honey meets with a hexagonal honeycomb pattern composed entirely of classic balloon dogs. The iconographic symbol of balloon art, connecting my family’s past in the cult with the medium I sculpt with today.

The large 6 x 7 foot painting that makes up the background is a more abstract form of the sculpture’s themes of beauty and goodness derived from chaos and despair. The various textures are created using many different techniques and acrylic mediums. Palette knives, piping bags, and custom hexagon silicone molds were used with modeling paste, acrylic gels, and crackle paste to evoke the gore and viscera of a decaying corpse alongside the life and structure of a buzzing beehive.

Working on a project over both the long and short term, with paintings that take months, and balloon sculptures that take days, puts in perspective the complexity of understanding someone’s story. To truly understand someone, you need to take in both their immediate lived and felt experiences, and the sometimes long and complicated history and context within which those events take place.

Creating this balloon sculpture for display while also setting up the rest of my exhibition posed more of a challenge than if I were to have worked solely in private. But it  all came together and I’m glad so many people got a chance to see it in person. There will be one final balloon sculpture/painting part in the series but I’ll be taking my time with it and setting up an event sometime in the future for its exhibition. Maybe as part of a group show; we’ll see.