Vincent Dermody
On View: January 13th through February 10th, 2018
MOUNTAIN is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition since its inception two years ago. What burns never returns* features new sculptures by artist Vincent Dermody. The artwork in this exhibition is an autobiography of paranormal abstraction. Dermody presents a collection of obsessively worked-over “memory jugs” accompanied by a gravestone of the artist himself – a former self metaphorically put to rest during a performative installation. The jugs are remnants of a past life of drunken nights. Empty craft beer growlers covered in oozing cement and embedded with heaps of found objects and collected ephemera. These layered vessels are reminders of the artist’s personal struggles with alcoholism, mental illness, and the death of his parents.
When Dermody’s father first arrived in the United States from Ireland, his name was mistakenly changed to Darmody. The year that Vincent’s mother died and several years after his father’s death, the artist finally changed his name back to its original, Dermody. Using the money from his small inheritance, the artist had a headstone professionally carved with the words “R.I.P. / VINCENT DARMODY / 1973-2000 / Aged 27 Years / D.D.D.” and presented it as part of an exhibition in 2003. Art critic James Yood (Artforum) stated that “the artist’s two names offered him a way to posit two identities and to take leave of one in a kind of palpable and self-indulgent exorcism, with a death undergone in order to make a rebirth possible.”
Shortly after that exhibition, the garage that the headstone was being stored in was burned to the ground in an arson fire. The headstone exploded and was destroyed, however the artist has revived the stone and given it new meaning as a sculptural object. The headstone and the cement-encased jugs all coalesce as objects of accumulation and abject catharsis. The artworks are a memento mori, reflecting on death, life, and the mining of personal histories.