description
Not long ago I was rummaging through a scrap yard and in a large box was a huge pile of electrical outlets. Immediately the cogs in my head started turning…or more appropriately, the light bulb went on over my head. I thought how wonderful these would be as the base for little nichos. Within an hour a new series was born.
In this class students will become electrical transformers (I know, bad joke). You will take one of the most uninteresting, utilitarian objects….the electrical outlet, and change it into something that does absolutely nothing that it was intended for. It will still transfer energy, but not in the same way. Instead these creations will transfer the energy that is only created by art…one of the most powerful forces in the world.
Don’t worry if you have no assemblage background… trust me when I say that by the end of class your piece will be all the buzz (I know, another bad joke….watt do you expect…ok I’ll stop).
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.
