description
Remember the Island of Misfit Toys in the claymation epic “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”. Well that’s nothing compared to what we’re going to do in this class. You’re going to bring all sorts of parts and pieces from a variety of toys. You round up everything from Barbies ,to Tonka trucks, to snow globes, to wind-up zeppelins, and reassemble them “into something rich and strange” (to quote Shakespeare’s The Tempest). Don’t worry if you toys aren’t dismantled yet…we can take care of that…bwwwwahahahahahaha (evil laugh - in case you were wondering). Using various techniques of assemblage we will turn our classroom in to a laboratory of the weird. Barbie and Ken will never be the same….as I said before ….bwwwwahahahaha.
Michael deMeng is an assemblage artist whose work is heavily influenced by Latin American art forms such as retablos, ex votos, and milagros. Born in Southern California, he now works and resides in Missoula "the cultural Mecca of Montana". He exhibits and teaches throughout the world, promoting the alchemy of transforming trash to treasure.
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.
