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d e   m a i l

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.

If you’ve ever seen Michael deMeng’s 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. There’s 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 deMeng’s 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 deMeng’s art, the clutter reflects the results as much as the process. His assemblage pieces—light boxes, decorated matchbooks and sardine cans, sport coats cocooned in plaster and acrylic paint—are 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 it’s 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 he’s been giving so many workshops. He’s 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 connoisseur’s 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 weight—a 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 didn’t, but insists he’d never do that now: The less he has to buy besides paint and glue, the better. Then again, he says, he’s also got an affection for certain objects that no amount of local foraging can turn up in sufficient quantities, like the lenses he’s working into a series of small pieces that look like Victorian spy gadgets. Discarded lenses he orders—again, by weight—from 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 weren’t many people looking for aluminum latex-glove forms.”

DeMeng says that the genesis of a particular project or series usually depends on what’s lying around at the time. Lately he’s 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 I’ve been working on lately has been smaller. Next year I’m going to be traveling around teaching a lot of workshops, and there’s 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 can’t spend $3,000 on a piece of art. They can spend $100. They’re hip, they don’t have quite enough money to buy art, but they try. It’s nice to able to make stuff that’s 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; you’re 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. Cornell’s 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 he’s more interested in the tiny doors than the actual boxes. Maybe he’ll 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 them—mostly, he says, because he doesn’t like falling into a routine. Regardless of what he would choose to place in them, he’d still have to wire each compartment for a light bulb and doubts he’d 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; that’s why he hasn’t 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 don’t do any welding. It’s 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 opinion—that stuff is just the best.”

Though deMeng’s process might be described colloquially as organic, his materials generally aren’t. 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. “I’m really intrigued by hornets and other winged insects—and winged things figure all throughout Mexican art—but I think it’s 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 I’m drawn to them on a personal level, I think I’ve 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 I’m 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 “Testing…1…2…3…,” 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.

While a sense of sacred enchantment prevails, deMeng’s pieces are also at home with the profane, the resolutely solid and the fixed—old straps of leather, rusted cogs, endless nails and corporeal reminders everywhere in the form of hands, eyes and bodies that look pulled from medical textbooks. The pieces provoke description but challenge the describer at the same time: Where to stop? DeMeng does not stop, his layers a history awaiting the future

Harnessing the Divine   by Hipolite Rafael Chacon                 

Michael deMeng creates Post-modern shrines. In his mixed-media assemblages he combines built elements, recycled frames and objects, and old photographs, with new painting and texts. DeMeng selects haunting and disturbing images that address the darker side of individualism in the contemporary world: themes of isolation, social alienation, and political oppression. Of course our world, especially the industrial west, has little tolerance for these aspects of the human experience and tends to promote illusions of happiness, youth, and longevity. The additive nature of his assemblages evokes the forms and working methods of Ed and Nancy Kienholz as well as those of Anselm Kiefer, and also alludes to the religious altars of Latin America and other traditional societies. Moreover, deMeng reworks images derived from silent films of the first two decades of the twentieth century, a tense period when western philosophers and theorists questioned our purpose and destiny as a rational society. In striking parallel to our times, that period offered new artistic media, including film and photography, and an array of pointing styles. These novel ways of perceiving and comprehending the human predicament also offered the possibility of flight from the drudgeries and responsibilities of modern life.
       

DeMeng acknowledges that he was raised in a pragmatic, secular, and agnostic culture, where questions of mortality and ultimate meaning are often shunned, but he greatly admires societies that possess traditional faith. Constructing his shrines and installations seems to fill the absence of shared experience and communal spirituality in his own life. He characterizes his creative process as an arduous and hellish journey of self-reflection, but making art is also salutary, a cathartic release of internal demons. As in the ex-votos of Latin American altars, need and desire are balanced with belief and hope and deMeng's works of art mediate between the ancestral past, the life of the living and an unknown future. In his shrines, color, pattern, texture, and repetition of form symbolize the cyclical nature of life and death. His process, evident in the work itself, embraces trial and error and reminds us of the resilience of the human spirit and the possibility of endless regeneration.