Artist Story: Vincent Dermody

Vincent Dermody, Altered City Flag (For D.M.), 2005

"Today I'm out wandering, turning my skull into a cup for others to drink wine from. In this town somewhere there sits a calm, intelligent man, who doesn't know what he's about to do!"

Akira Kurosawa said to never avert ones eyes, but he didn't have an Emac w/ high speed internet access. You're thoughts are like a laser, they cut through everything today. So I started getting tons of office emails, **Spam** and such. And when my co-worker Solen started sending me "jokes" I was amused at first. Like the quicktime movie of the Hot 97 Slap Contest between two ghettos: Bronx and Queens. It's brutal and kept to pretty rigid rules of gamesmanship set by gentleman duelers in the 18th century. They smack the snot out each other for what seems like an hour though, taking turns, and Bronx ends up with a badly busted lip; Queens several hundred dollars richer. Standing between the two contestants, the MC calls out the burrough and then Schwack! BRONX! Schwaplap! Ohh! QUEENS! Thwack! Ohh! The quicktime videos turned into snapshots of a midday close-up of a Drunk Driving Wreck in Jamaica. The driver caught a pole through the windshield from a fence straight through the dome. If I need to remind you at this point that a post is metal, you're not getting my point. The last email I allowed myself to look at was 'Lovers In The Hallway'. The sixty second love-loss to staged suicide that leaked onto the internet. I gasped when I watched the young and immaculately corn-rowed kid in his puffy coat put the gun in his mouth after the elevator closed on his soul.

Flying the flag and carrying the torch. Representing sadness and loss. The severe threat looms and no one is giving up. We are all waiting for the Department's rating scales to mutate into a sepia toned silver grayness. Like burned out lampshade.Sharing something crossed between Mr. Molholy- Nagy's eight distinct ways of seeing plus a healthy respect for the ten plagues. Through our penetrative gazes we forget to look right into where it gets dark. To where it is so dark it's light. In between your heart and your coat.

Currently Subleasing Superman's Fortress of Solitude. The view is nice and it is surprisingly cosy but someone keeps stealing my morning paper and the phone lines are all f'd up. So life on the Space Station is O.K. Thanks for asking. Somethings missing though. I watched the sunrise on top of a psuedo-glacier this morning and stared at the sun for as long as my eyes could take. It left me a little blind. I don't need to see though. [Listen up ya'll. This is not reality. It was real but we got a call from Human Resources. And they misplaced the Real. Fake rules. Failure is the only way to suceed. When the definition never suits what you are doing, you are doing something right. Chimp's abstractions go to the auction block and fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.] Now that New Orleans dry water marks rise to reveal the 10th ring of Hell, it seems silly to even want to see. No offense to the blind. Wanting the slow burn and loss of faith associated with not caring anymore to become inspirational. Wishing the pain to become clearer by abstracting it.

V.D.

P.S.-
The "Sure Thing" isn't. I'm still waiting for my curators license to come in the mail. Once a week I think I see the green envelope (it's the same color green as a P.G.A. Master's Coat) poking out of the corner of my mailbox. I realized I was a "curator" as well as an "artist" the second my peers all started to say the same thing in different languages and I was the only one who noticed. So, Doctor, that's what you need to do. That and buy some insurance.



Vincent Dermody is so local it hurts. He was born and raised on the North Side. LAW OFFICE lived and burns in his imagination and still does daily. They had a motto that was the basic rule to good shows, "quit as soon as it becomes mediocre." Collectives are like that. Jerry Saltz was saying just that, at the exact moment LAW OFFICE was dissolving faster than you could say "Fleetwood Mac."