Valley Ridge
Muscoda, WI
Aug 25-29
The Ranch
Snohomish, WA
Sept 11-12
Collage
Portland, OR
Sept 15-16
M.E.C.C.A
Eugene, OR
Sept 18-19
Tangerine
Dublin, CA
Sept 26-28
Art is You
Danbury Plaza, CT
Oct 7-11
Shelburne Art Center
Burlington, VT
Oct 16-17
deMeng de los Muertos
Oaxaca Mexico
Oct 25 -Nov 3
New Orleans
2011
Feb 16 - 20
Art and Soul
Las Vegas
Feb 28 - Mar 3
deMeng de los Muertos 2010
This year's class:
Altar-ed Faces: Nicho Masks and Paint-Making
In this class we are going to create masks that also function as shrines...."Head Cases" or "Altar'ed Faces"...take your pick. Using assemblage techniques students will create reliquaries that could potentially be worn as well as hang on the wall.
Now for the really exciting part:
We are also going to explore a variety of paint-making methods, ranging from indigenous Mexican techniques to contemporary processes. There are some really unusual and fascinating indigenous techniques that Mexicans use to create paints....very weird science. Using these techniques we will create paints and colors the old fashioned way....the really old fashioned way.
We will also use learn t make textures and colors from some of the materials we find along the way. I will also incorporate some modern paint technologies in the paint making process...just to keep things interesting.
This workshop will also include a variety of Day of the Dead activities, as well as excursions throughout the artistically rich Oaxacan Valley. More information on those tours as they get worked out.
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
For more info contact Colleen Darling: 805-688-1221 colleen950_gmail.com
New Orleans 2011: February 16th - 20th
A Place for Notions and Potions: An Apothecary Kit
More Information
27"x13"x6"
Detail
30"x12"x13"
24"x5"x4"
"5x8"x3"
Signed Copy
Price:30
Checkout
8"x11.5"
Price:15
8"x11.5
Artist Statement:
My work is about transformations. It is about the transformation of the common into the sacred. Discarded materials find new and unexpected uses in my work; they are reassembled and conjoined with unlikely components, a form of rebirth from the ashes into new life and new meaning. These assemblages are metaphors for the evolutions and revolutions of existence: from life to death to rebirth, from new to old to renewed, from construction to destruction to reconstruction. These forms are examinations of the world in perpetual flux, where meaning and function are ever-changing.
Missoula artist's new book tells dark tales of pieces inspired by Mexican holiday
By JOE NICKELL of the Missoulian Friday, April 23, 2010
In the fourth chapter of his new book, "Dusty Diablos," Missoula artist Michael DeMeng addresses a topic that would seem to be central to his aesthetic sensibilities: mortality.
Death and decay are everywhere in DeMeng's assemblage artworks. There are the overt references - gaping skulls, broken gauges, exposed innards and pierced skins - and there are the iconographic nods: shrine- and coffin-like forms, angels and devils.
One might assume that DeMeng is preoccupied with death.
One might be wrong.
"Mortality has never been a big deal for me," writes DeMeng in that fourth chapter, "or perhaps I should say I don't obsess over its inevitability. Actually, I am pretty fascinated by the cycles of life and death and perhaps that's why I have always been fascinated by the Mexican celebration of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead)."
DeMeng goes on to describe the first time he ever attended a Day of the Dead festival, in the village of Xoxocotlan. "I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life," recalls DeMeng, describing the scene in the town cemetery, where graves had been decorated with candles, marigolds, skeletal toys, and sand paintings. "I was entranced, literally. I wandered around mesmerized by the visuals."
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That experience is one of many during his frequent trips to Mexico that helped form DeMeng's utterly unique aesthetic. And it also helps explain the elements in his artwork that some in America might view as macabre, even morbid.
"Dusty Diablos" is his ode to that country's aesthetic, blended with a fascinating exploration of DeMeng's own artistic process. Each chapter centers around one artwork that DeMeng made over the past couple of years. Each of those artworks reflects on a different theme in Mexican folklore, religious practice, and iconography.
Those themes range from playfulness - There are chapters and artworks dedicated to luchadors (the gaudily costumed Mexican wrestlers), Mezcal (the popular liquor), and taxicab shrines - to the macabre.
One chapter tells of a small river island outside Mexico City called the Isla de las Munecas (Island of the Dolls), where a young girl drowned in the 1920s. For decades after, a hermit named Don Julian collected old dolls and hung them from the trees on the island, creating a kind of haunted forest of weathered dolls, many of them draped in spiderwebs.
DeMeng's visit to that island, and his knowledge of another Mexican folktale about a woman who drowned her own children, inspired one of the many works featured in the book, "La Llorna," a shrine-like wall-hanger in which a bereaved mother searches for her lost children - fittingly, through the lens of an old lantern.
It's just one of many eye-popping artworks and fascinating tales that couple together in "Dusty Diablos," a book that DeMeng views as a much-deserved homage to a culture and aesthetic that has guided him since his first visit to the town of Oaxaca in 1992.
"Given the sheer amount of time I spend in Mexico, it seemed pretty natural for me to do a book based on some of those mythologies and folklores and pop culture aspects of Mexican culture," said DeMeng. "This was really a labor of love for me."
"Dusty Diablos" is DeMeng's second book, following on his 2007 volume, "Secrets of Rusty Things: Transforming Found Objects into Art." Both books follow a similar formula, presenting accounts of DeMeng's influences as well as brief tutorials on his techniques.
It's a natural approach for an artist who spends about four months out of every year teaching workshops in places like Oaxaca, New Orleans, and elsewhere around the world.
The new book, however, feels much closer to DeMeng's spirit. After all, he credits Mexican art for some of the most fundamental aspects of his own.
"Before I started going to Mexico, I was dealing mostly in two-dimensional pieces," said DeMeng. "Just by those trips to Mexico - seeing shrines and going to the cemeteries and seeing the ofrendas (altars to the deceased) - and by seeing that you can use physical objects, real things in artwork, that made more of an impact on my approach than anything else I've experienced," said DeMeng. "It totally opened up a new world for me."
In June, the artworks featured in DeMeng's book will be on view at the gallery at Wood Fusion Studio, on the corner of South Fourth and Oak streets. In the meantime, he'll present a book signing and brief talk next Tuesday, April 27, at 7 p.m. at Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Missoula.
His hope, if nothing else, is that the book will help open people's eyes to the approachability of his art, and to a culture where art is viewed an essential part of everyday life.
"Mexican culture has a love of art that's really pervasive and just normal," said DeMeng. "There's such a respect for artists there, and yet art isn't viewed as something somehow outside or elevated above the everyday life. In American culture, people tend to be afraid of art, they're afraid to ask questions about it; where it seems that in Mexico, art is very welcoming to people, to all levels, so you don't have to be an intellectual. That's really appealing and inspiring to me."
Bring the Dead to Life
DeMeng pays tribute to Mexican traditions in new book
by Erika Fredrickson from Missoula Independent
April 22, 2010
Michael DeMeng recalls the first time he stepped into a Mexican cemetery. It was late December, 1993, and the village of Xo Xo on the outskirts of Oaxaca City was celebrating its annual Day of the Dead festival. Though it was dark outside, a sea of candlelight made it easier for DeMeng to make out locals gathered around brightly colored, flower-framed shrines that honored dead loved ones. He had his camera with him, but instead of photographing the scene he decided to wander through it, letting the weathered statues, skeleton drawings, bent photographs and mementos of the shrines pull him into the experience.
"In my mind it's the most beautiful thing I have in memory," he says. "It's one of those places that really changed me as an artist. It made my 2-D world into a 3-D world. I started working with more found objects and shrines. And I fell in love with the place and the culture."
Over the years, since his first trip to Oaxaca, DeMeng has established himself as a local Latin American-inspired assemblage artist with a penchant for found, often rusty, objects. He's created shrines and statues consisting of grinning skeletons, stoic saints and snarling demons. Old pocket watch faces become eyes. Little doors and windows open into nooks and crannies filled with tiny totems.
DeMeng's new book, Dusty Diablos: Folklore, Iconography, Assemblage, Ole (which follows his previous Secret of Rusty Things) shows a lot about who DeMeng is as an art educator. The book delves into Mexican folklore and pop culture, but it's not just for a passive audience. DeMeng teaches workshops on assemblage, and so the book serves as inspiration for the aspiring rusty-object enthusiast. If you want to learn how to age a bottle cap so you can make it into a folk charm called a milagro, there's a whole step-by-step recipe. It also has tear-out loteria cards for the reader's personal projects, plus a full-on explanation of how to make your own shrine. But when you boil the book down to its core, it's really just part of DeMeng's ongoing tribute to Mexico.
"The stories and the items and ideas of the book are part of the Mexican experience and my interpretation of those things," he says. "It's a love affair with Mexico."
Last year, DeMeng took a gondola trip to the Island of the Dolls near Mexico City where he discovered an intriguing project that's spanned over 50 years. The islandIsla de Las Muecassits in a network of water called the Xochimilico Canals. It's as big as a city block and full of thousands of old dollssome hanging up in trees and others gathered in spots on the ground. DeMeng learned that a farmer named Julian Santana had lived alone on the island for several decades. After he heard the cries of what he claimed were those of a young girl who had drowned in the water years earlier, the farmer began to build a shrine to the girl, amassing junked dolls he found in Mexico City dumpsters. Soon, people began bringing him dolls to add the collection (often in exchange for the produce he grew on the island). Even after Santana died in 2001, dolls have continued to appear on the island.
"That's what I love about Mexicoevery place you turn you find strange little things like that," says DeMeng. "Is it mere superstition or is there something to it? Or does it matter? It was real enough for him. And from that, he created an art piece, an installation that he left behind for us to see."
The dolls affected DeMeng more than he had thought they would. He returned to Missoula to continue to make art, but the images of doll parts started working their way into his pieces.
"After I got back from photographing the island I found myself drawn to little doll hands and broken faces," he says, "things that you find in a doll hospital."
Doll parts, rusty nails, skeletons and broken pieces of wing make for a macabre style, but DeMeng insists a bleak outlook does not fuel his style. Instead, he's inspired by the liveliness he finds in Mexcio, including that first day in the Mexican cemetery. It's why he continues to travel back to Oaxaca every year.
"Being in that space with all these families gathered around graves honoring their deceased loved ones, it became very clear to me that this life and death is different from what we have in the states," he says. "Some people consider it grim, but it's not at all. It was heartwarming. I definitely think they have a better grasp of mortality than we do. Even beyond Day of the Dead, I think they have a better grasp of living. And this art grew from that experience."
Michael DeMeng gives a presentation on Dusty Diablos: Folklore, Iconography, Assemblage, Ole at Shakespeare & Co. Tuesday, April 27, at 7 PM. Free.
deMeng's junket into the art of junk: There is no trash - there is only creation for one of Missoula's most unique artists
By JOE NICKELL of the Missoulian
ScrAPS
It's 9:30 a.m. on the first Saturday in September when Michael deMeng arrives at his first yard sale of the day: a modest, two-table affair just down the street from Bernice's Bakery.
DeMeng grasps his large green coffee mug in one hand and slowly circles the tables as the owner of the house looks on quietly. The tables have already been picked over pretty well, leaving only a few oddments: kitchen gadgets, a ceramic mug, a travel iron. A rusting outdoor grill sits on the ground nearby, along with some other castaway objects of uncertain purpose.
DeMeng picks up a flat, circular piece of stainless steel from one of the tables. The metal piece has five holes cut in it, evenly spaced around the perimeter; in those holes nest five rounded metal cups. A subtle smile slowly spreads on deMeng's face. "This is nice," he says to the woman standing nearby. "What is it?"
"It's an egg poacher," she says. DeMeng examines the rattling poacher thoughtfully for a moment, then notices the travel iron.
"It works," chimes the woman. "I made sure before I put it out here."
"Oh, I don't care about that," says deMeng as he picks up the iron and cradles it in the crook of his arm. "I'm an artist, so I never use these things for what they're supposed to be used for."
The woman's eyes light up. "What kind of art do you do?"
"It's kind of like little shrines, made out of junk," deMeng replies.
"Oh," says the woman, her voice rising and falling in a bemused arc as she gazes at the items deMeng has collected from her tables. "Well, we've got some of that."
SHRINES
Little shrines, made out of junk: In a way, it's as simple as that.
And yet, there is nothing simple about the fate that awaits these objects in the hands of Michael deMeng. By the time he's done with them, chances are they won't look anything like what they do when deMeng picks them up at yard sales and antique shops. Nor will they look like any shrine you've ever seen.
Instead, these mundane, cast-away objects are likely to become encrusted and entangled in a painted, welded, glued-together assemblage that seems to have come from another time, a parallel culture where gleam and rot share equal glory. These seemingly disparate objects - guitar strings and keyholes, bicycle horns and egg poachers - crash together in artworks that speak obliquely yet profoundly about the beauty of decay and the impermanence under the surface of all that glitters.
CLOWNS
Twenty minutes later, deMeng is wandering around in the back yard of a house on Woodford Street. Several long tables are set at perfect angles to one another on a covered concrete patio flanked by an immaculately kept lawn. Neatly arrayed on the tables is an odd assortment of mostly pastel-colored holiday-related items and knickknacks: a set of hand-painted miniature China plates, several stuffed Easter bunnies, some colorful cardboard placards adorned with Christian phrases, a painted ceramic tableau depicting two Native Americans surprised by a growling bear.
"Well, this is surreal," deMeng says matter-of-factly, under his breath. "It's like going to Santa's holiday land."
He sifts through a pile and suddenly pulls out a baggie full of tiny plastic clown heads. "Oh my God, look at this" he enthuses. "This is great"
He begins turning one of the clown heads between his fingers inside the bag, admiring it. "There's this paint called Modern Options - it's actually metal that you can paint onto things," says deMeng. "Once you've painted something like this, you can add chemicals to the surface so that it will rust. It can make something mundane and plastic like this look really cool and old.
"So I think I can put these to use."
ICONS
DeMeng buys the baggie of plastic heads. As we walk toward the car, he talks about the echoes of religious iconography in his work.
"I try to be a little nebulous on religion and spirituality," he says. "I try not to offend people or distract them with too much religious symbolism in my work; that's why I stay away from the most obvious references like crucifixes and that kind of stuff. I see what I do as more an analysis of the forms that we recognize in that realm, playing on them to talk about something new."
TRANSIT
Driving across town toward another sale that sounds promising, deMeng talks about how he approaches the first stages of creating a new artwork.
"It is a battle to get the work to finally start working with me," says deMeng. "Once that happens it's easy to get going; but when I'm first trying to make a decision of which way to go with all the various materials I've assembled, it's just sheer hell. It's like I'm pleading with the piece of art, 'Please tell me what you want from me' Usually I get to this stage of, 'What am I even thinking? I'm not an artist. Who could even think that I'm an artist, I suck, I'm lousy, I'm horrible, I can't think of anything original to do.'
"Then, usually, at that point I start getting really desperate and trying weird stuff and then, finally, doorways start to open," deMeng continues. "The piece starts to cooperate with me. It's like having a strange personality in the room that wants to sort of toy with me for awhile, wants to know if I'm worthy enough to give me some information, then it finally decides I'm worthy so it passes me through."
DELUXE
We stop at a sale in the University neighborhood, where deMeng finds an old rolling golf-club cart. The woman selling it wants $8. deMeng agrees to the price without even checking whether or not the wheels turn.
"You see this?" deMeng quietly enthuses, pointing to a small, brass-colored plate on the cart, stamped with the word, "Deluxe."
"At a lot of antique stores you'd pay $25 just for that little plate," he says. "This is great."
What will he do with it?
DeMeng shrugs.
"I'm always looking for things that make me think, OK, I haven't quite seen that before, I can definitely apply that somehow somewhere that would be unique from what I have been doing," he says. "The last thing in the world I want to do is keep creating the same thing. That's always a difficulty for an artist because it's really easy to fall into your old habits; you can never really escape your own style entirely. So one of the ways I can avoid feeling like I'm repeating myself is by using objects that are non-repeatable.
"Like with the golf cart: There are things on there which I'll never see again anywhere," he continues. "That will make whatever I ultimately do with it unique from anything I would ever have done before or will ever do again."
CHEAP
DeMeng is the first to admit, his original motive for making art out of cast-off objects was more pragmatic than inspired.
"Basically being a cheapskate is what got me into using found objects," he says with a laugh. "Getting out of school deMeng studied art at the University of Montana, I was hit with the fact that paint's expensive, canvas is expensive; so I eventually realized, hmmm, it's much cheaper to do stuff on shovels. Junk is cheap, junk is free, so it led to this whole direction.
"The other reason I was so attracted to it as a process was because ... I always hated the blank canvas," he adds. "It was so intimidating, and really freaked me out. The nice thing with junk, you already have something established there. You don't have to invent the entire universe, you only have to invent part of the universe."
THE END
By noon, deMeng has nearly filled the back of my truck with an assortment of objects from the various sales around town: A large armload of rotting pieces of wood with rusted metal hardware attached; a bucket of bolts; some various parts from an old iron stove and other curiosities.
We drop the haul at his studio on Missoula's north side, and he invites me in to view the piece he's working on now, a commission from a patron in Australia. It's a large aluminum globe, about three feet in diameter, which deMeng purchased at the Montana Antique Mall and proceeded to alter with all manner of objects: The winder from a tape measure, some embossed metallic hands, and various scraps, the origin of which even he has a hard time remembering. All of it is painted over in a thick, dark emerald swirl.
While the globe is the main thing he's working on now, other works are scattered around the room in various states of completion. DeMeng's work has lately come into demand - not so much in Missoula, but around the country and even in far-flung regions of the world. He recently published a gorgeous, first-person monograph about his work, and has been flying all over the country this summer, teaching at workshops and universities in America and Mexico.
All that hasn't made finishing the globe any easier. DeMeng says it was only in the last two days that he finally began feeling like the piece was working for him - or, as he puts it, with him.
"Three-dimensional pieces are hard because you can't see things all at once," he says, spinning the globe as he speaks. "You have to keep rotating it to keep a sense of oneness to it, to make sure things are working together coherently. I've never done anything quite like this."
And if nothing else is certain in the intuitive, perspective-jarring works of Michael deMeng, this much can be predicted: He'll never do anything quite like this again.
Reach Joe Nickell at 523-5358 or at jnickell_missoulian.com.
One man's trash
by Andy Smetanka -Missoula Independent Vol. 16 No. 3 - Issue Date 1/20/2005
If youve ever seen Michael deMengs art, you can pretty much guess what his studio looks like: a jumbo cardboard box full of cut-up and yet-to-be-cut-up magazines here, the rusty innards of a mechanical cash register there. A bag of bottle caps. Buckets of gears and cogs. Threaded brass bushings and odd bits of rusting iron everywhere. Theres crap all over the place.
Mixed in with all this clutter are pieces of art in various stages of completion and, sometimes, willful neglect. A half-eaten foam apple with a riveted faux-brass skin sticks out of a bucket of mechanical whatsits, looking like a cross between Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies and the ironclad Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A few finished pieces line the walls and fill the corners, but elsewhere deMengs backyard studio is a paradise of the finished, the half-finished and the altogether unbegun decorated in Discriminating Packrat style. And this, deMeng admits, is after a recent cleaning bender.
Yet with deMengs art, the clutter reflects the results as much as the process. His assemblage pieceslight boxes, decorated matchbooks and sardine cans, sport coats cocooned in plaster and acrylic paintare essentially junk reincarnated, though not necessarily long for one body. He has to hustle finished pieces out of the studio as quickly as he can, he says; the ones that stick around are at constant risk of being dismantled, stripped and repurposed. Nothing here, you quickly gather, is truly finished until its been evacuated to a safe place. Even then, you might wonder where safe is; a silverware organizer filled with spoons looks as though someone might come looking for it until deMeng mentions that his wife just bought new flatware and told him he could have his way with the old stuff.
DeMeng says his studio has been filling with junk faster than usual lately because hes been giving so many workshops. Hes had to put more friends on the lookout for good junk to set aside for him, because too many of his workshop participants seem to miss the point. When he tells them to bring junk, he says, they usually take it to mean knick-knacks. No, no, no, he insists: When I say junk, you gotta bring junk.
DeMeng, as you might expect, has a connoisseurs eye for junk and the street smarts for where to find it. One of his favorite places to cruise for art supplies is Pacific Steel, where he can buy gears by weighta 40-pound bucket of them for six or eight bucks. He scours alleys and loading bays for discards and castoffs, like the disemboweled cash register currently antiquing au natural in the rusting yard adjacent to his studio shed. He says he once shelled out $25 at a secondhand store just to get a gear he wanted on an item he otherwise didnt, but insists hed never do that now: The less he has to buy besides paint and glue, the better. Then again, he says, hes also got an affection for certain objects that no amount of local foraging can turn up in sufficient quantities, like the lenses hes working into a series of small pieces that look like Victorian spy gadgets. Discarded lenses he ordersagain, by weightfrom a scientific supply company. And sometimes an opportunity will just present itself, which is the story behind his Eye of Fatima series of decorated aluminum hands. Those he got on eBay, and without much of a bidding war.
It was pretty easy, he admits. There werent many people looking for aluminum latex-glove forms.
DeMeng says that the genesis of a particular project or series usually depends on whats lying around at the time. Lately hes been concentrating on smaller pieces, like the matchbooks and sardine tins currently on display at the Saltmine art space on Front Street. Mostly for pragmatic reasons, he says; smaller means more portable, and generally cheaper:
Yeah, a lot of the stuff Ive been working on lately has been smaller. Next year Im going to be traveling around teaching a lot of workshops, and theres something to being able to sell things that people can pack in a suitcase. And, on a local level, people who really jibe with my stuff often cant spend $3,000 on a piece of art. They can spend $100. Theyre hip, they dont have quite enough money to buy art, but they try. Its nice to able to make stuff thats a little more accessible.
The objects in the Saltmine exhibit are for sale; a matchbook will set you back about $45 and a sardine tin roughly twice that. But calling any of the pieces a matchbook or a sardine can only really describes the original function of the object; youre not really looking at either anymore. Of the Saltmine exhibit, deMeng says he admires the way the work was mounted because it suggests the Mexican folk art he counts among his biggest influences. The arrangement of sardine cans, he explains, makes them look like a santo, a shrine erected to one of the various Catholic saints, often using personal effects, found and repurposed objects.
DeMeng brooks passing comparisons to American assemblage icon Joseph Cornell with good humor, although a loose kinship in the genre is about as far as those comparisons go. Cornells shadow boxes, says deMeng, emphasize sacred objects in small groupings; his own pieces are intended to emphasize the whole conveyance. A bank of salvaged post office boxes in several chunks collecting ambient decay in the rusting yard cries the loudest for a Cornell-style assemblage, he admits, but hes more interested in the tiny doors than the actual boxes. Maybe hell reserve one chunk for such a piece, and maybe not; he says he tends to shy away from projects with a series seemingly built right into themmostly, he says, because he doesnt like falling into a routine. Regardless of what he would choose to place in them, hed still have to wire each compartment for a light bulb and doubts hed have the patience to follow through.
Or the electrical know-how. DeMeng also admits a tendency to avoid learning new disciplines when he can work around structural problems with existing methods; thats why he hasnt learned to weld, he says, even though his friend and fellow artist George Ybarra has been offering to teach him for ages. People think I do a lot of welding, he says. I dont do any welding. Its mostly screwing things in or attaching them with nuts and bolts, various epoxies and things like that. Liquid Nails is the mother of all inventions, in my opinionthat stuff is just the best.
Though deMengs process might be described colloquially as organic, his materials generally arent. He prefers metal to wood (and most materials to plastic), and almost never uses living or once-living tissue. The warmth of his studio sustains a few beetles through the winter (in fact, they look right at home scurrying over his workbench, invoking not damp or squalor but living clutter), but deMeng says that his one experiment to date with putting an insect into a piece was kind of a disappointment: The bug fell apart.
I started rethinking that a little bit, he says, alluding to possible insect inclusions in the future. Im really intrigued by hornets and other winged insectsand winged things figure all throughout Mexican artbut I think its going to require some additional experimentation. Their wings tend to wilt a little when you put glue on them.
Bones, on the other hand, have been ruled out for the time being: A lot of people have asked me about using bones and do I want any bones, and even though Im drawn to them on a personal level, I think Ive always steered away from using them in my work because a lot of people see my work as being darker anyway. I figured if I started adding bones to it, it would feed into a stereotype that Im trying to break a little bit.
The eyes have it
by Susanna Sonnenberg - Missoula Independent Vol. 14 No. 47 Issue Date 11/20/2003
Mike deMeng's layered history
Mike deMeng’s inventive, surreal mixed-media pieces give you the feeling you’re being watched. This sense emanates from the entire collection of four dozen pieces showing through November at the Sutton Gallery, and not only because the artist uses eyes everywhere. DeMeng, who lives in Missoula, takes old, found objects, recycled metals, ancient newsprint, vintage daguerreotypes, wires, coils, springs and nails to compose layered works of peculiar ferocity.
The layering suggests that things are not as they seem, and that there is more to see than can be seen, those eyes inviting and mocking at the same time. In “Wandering Mind,” one in a series of four lightboxes, a 5-inch-square wooden frame hugs the mouth of a metal box. It is fitted with a pane of glass, then one or two more pieces of glass behind that. On each surface deMeng has left a mark. The frame is rigid with old soil, and the first pane is painted in delicate tiny strokes, fogged with amber color and then scraped. Peer inside and ghostly faces emerge as shadowy, tiny negatives. The box is illuminated by a murky glow, and the electrical cord bears a skeletal wire as it snakes toward the outlet. In another lighted box piece titled “Testing123,” a glass peephole set into an empty watch face invites you to press up close and abandon yourself to an unseen world. The interior is crammed with images and textures, scraps of newsprint, numbers and a photo that preserves a long-dead young man, someone else’s eyes torn from another picture and superimposed on his face.
DeMeng has been instrumental in Missoula’s Festival of the Dead for over a decade, and his work bears the influence of sacred Latin American icons and shrines, as well as Hindu imagery. He hints that art is sacred, its own religion, and that the right place for his pieces would be in a devotional space. Many of the pieces are playful and humorous, yet still maintain a stately composition and an aggressive symmetry. In a group titled “Head Sea Scrolls” and numbered 1 through 3, deMeng drapes thin lengths of canvas from toilet paper holders, the long strips a beautiful and crazy narrative, the free association that seems to be forever unspooling from deMeng’s mind.
The show also includes 6-foot totems, a few decorated and transformed pieces of mail, a costumed wine bottle and a series of keys, mounted to span an entire wall of the gallery. The objects are important, inspiring in the elaborate work wrought upon them. With such names as “Parlor Key,” “Salon Key” and “Observatory Key,” the key collection evokes a cavernous, enchanted, lost mansion. Each piece begins with a single key, which deMeng has dressed in imaginative constructions that speak the function of the room they open. “Kitchen Key” bears a half-eaten spoon bound tightly to the key. “Bedroom Key” shows a woman’s alluring face behind a ball of glass, metal wings spread on either side of the key for a welcoming embrace.
This attention to the minute gives all of deMeng’s pieces an air of exquisite obsession. Even the large pieces, the totems, feature tiny daubs of paint everywhere. In “Gender Identity Crisis,” the belly of a box is speckled with tiny newsprint letters, each one cut and mounted on the head of a nail protruding an inch or so. Close inspection of the show reveals tiny hearts, words, hands. “Interiors” uses an ancient book, its cover open like a door, a window cut into it, its pages glued shut with gilt edging. A tiny, centered, ancient face stares out, again layered with eyes.
It is tempting to pick apart the elements that, gathered together, make up a single piece. So much is happening, and the antique nature of the materials inspires curiosity and melancholy, as if you could unlock some forgotten mystery. Perhaps, you think, breaking deMeng’s code will help you. But to see the pieces in their parts would be to miss the power of their presence in total. They are imposing animals, these pieces, writhing with artistic authority and a sense of industrial use. He gives humanity to the inanimate and renders new altars for the dead.
