veronique d’entremont

& accompanying collaborations with

DA Mekonnen, Marcel Marcel, & Raqael Duarte Hunt

September 23, 2023 - October 15, 2023

Framed as a conceptual feast with many courses, veronique d’entremont’s exhibition “The Table is the Altar,” will undergo various iterations over the course of the month it is installed.  The title is a reference to roving feasts that were the centerpiece of spiritual practice among early Christians.  Coming out of the Greek magical tradition and the Roman suppression of the cult of Dionysis, early Christians cultivated “burial fellowships” by sharing meals in multifarious gatherings of non-relatives who would be responsible for tending to them upon their death.  At these gatherings, individuals cultivated new kin, beyond their blood relations.  A queer family, of sorts.  D’entremont’s interest in this ancient form of collective care emerges from their lived experience: As an only child without offspring, the artist’s rumination on their own aging and dying process has undergone a series of reimaginings since the suicide of their mother in 1999 and the more recent passing of their father in 2021.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

Over the course of one month, the table at the center of the exhibition will be a platform for three separate installations–each a symbolic body undergoing the process of consumption.  There will be a public viewing each times the body on the table changes form, as well as two additional gatherings, making for five total “courses” to this conceptual feast:

Programming:

1. FIRST COURSE: Saturday, Sept 23, 5-8pm - "The Table is the Altar" Exhibition opening reception

2. SECOND COURSE: Sunday, Sept 24, 2-4pm - “But Then Who Will Bury My Bones (burial fellowship)” co-facilitated with DA Mekonnen

3. THIRD COURSE: Saturday, October 7th, 4-7pm - "Guts4Guts" reception (collaboration with Marcel Marcel)

4. FOURTH COURSE: Saturday, October 14, 2-4pm - Ancestral healing ritual (In collaboration with Raqael Duarte Hunt)

5. FIFTH COURSE: Sunday, October 15 2-5pm-  Exhibition closing reception, and “Transmission Session” with DA Mekonnen.  “A chime, then silence.  A low, long tone on a saxophone, then another. These build. For twenty-one minutes and one second, together we will enter a liminal space.”

“Being of Sound Mind.” 2023. Composting worms, dirt, medical directive signed by the artist upon their 18th birthday, mandating the conditions under which they should be permitted to die.

“The Table is the Altar,” will be centered around a kitchen table, surrounded by three chairs from d’entremont’s childhood home.  On either side of the table will hang two “grave rubbings,” that the artist made by tracing the contours and textures of furniture in their late father’s house with grave rubbing crayons.  Over the rubbings, d’entremont has transcribed portions of letters left behind by their father, giving instructions for what to do upon the potential deaths of himself, the artist’s mother, and the artist themselves–age 15 at the time the letter was written.  The letters are painted in with an ink similar to that which makes medieval manuscripts so difficult to preserve–a highly acidic ink of oak tannin and iron oxide, that gradually eats away at the fabric on which it is written.  

The “first course” of our conceptual feast will feature the central table overflowing with worm compost and worms, consuming a medical directive the artist’s father asked them to sign a few days after their 18th birthday, mandating the conditions under which the artist should be permitted to die.  The second course, “But Then Who Will Bury My Bones (burial fellowship),” will be a gathering in which participants will be invited to reflect upon experiences, anxieties, grief and hope as we consider preparing for the deaths of ourselves and those around us.  The table in the feast’s “third course” will feature “Guts4Guts” an installation by Marcel Marcel, composed of SCOBY kombucha cultures growing in the sets of decorative china left behind by the grandmothers of both artists.  Recalling the Maenads – female followers of the cult of Dionysis whose consumption of fermented beverages to be freed from their earthly bodies in preparation for the experience of death–participants will be invited to lift these vessels to their mouths and join an interconnected ecosystem of consumption, destruction and reproduction, consuming the liquid that is in the process of consuming itself.  We will gather around the table once again during the “fourth course,” for an ancestral healing ritual, a guided meditation and writing exercise led by d’entremont and collaborator Raqael Duarte Hunt toward the work of ancestral connection and healing. At this time, the table will support a bronze casting d’entremont created from a partially-consumed deer leg that they witnessed being torn apart by a bald eagle and vulture the first night they slept in their late father’s house. Over the time d’entremont tended to the deer's body, it became a stand-in for their father, their mother, and even themselves within their evolving artistic and spiritual cosmology.  During our “fifth course” and closing reception, DA Mekonnen will conduct a quadraphonic experience of ecstatic saxophone, dubbed a “Transmission Session” when Mekonnen collaborated with d’entremont on the their 2019 installation “Her Body Becomes an Antenna, Transmitting the Message of God” in Los Angeles.  

“If you are reading this…” 2023. materials: grave rubbing crayon on muslin, acorn tannin, iron oxide

ARTIST BIOS:

veronique d’entremont (@verohneek) is a trans-disciplinary artist and visual storyteller whose practice spans devotional sculpture, hybrid documentary, ritual/performance, and inter-species collaboration.  The artist descends from a line of Sicilian women who are either blessed with spiritual gifts or cursed with bi-polar disorder, depending upon who you ask. Approaching personal content as both a research and a spiritual practice, d’entremont creates objects and interactive installations that examine poetic entanglements across the veil of life and death. Whether an artwork is composed of cemetery dirt and human cremains, or burnout castings designed to release a curse, d’entremont believes objects can hold memory and that a sculpture can also be a spell.

DA Mekonnen (@ecogrief) is an Ethiopian-American artist and musician born in a Sudanese refugee community and based in Boston. His current project, Emergence, deeply explores the legacy of instrumentalist and composer, Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, by bringing together elements of spiritual jazz, Indian classical music, Afrofuturism, and his own voice. 

Marcel Marcel (@spandexical01)  is an emerging video and installation artist based in Boston and born in the former Soviet Union. They work with microbial SCOBYs, experimental cake scapes, lo-fi sculptural props, performance, sound-scapes, drawing, writing, AR face filters and digital ephemera. Together, these materials become a polyphonic mode to interrogate fascism, capitalism, surveillance and the fiction of borders and binaries. Hovering between the absurd and the abject, Marcel's work offers a speculative refuge for queer liberatory futures, joy and healing.

Raqael Duarte Hunt (@raqaellaque)

Drawing upon the wisdom of her mixed ancestral threads including AfroCaribbean, Taino, Jewish, and African-American, she works from the space in between. Animist, artist, maven and mother; she dances with the unknown and brings back bread crumbs to guide the paths of others. She situates her practice from within the cosmologies of cultural anthropology, theatre and dramaturgy, Ayurveda, sidereal and tropical astrologies, and trance-based soul tending. Her holistic approach to ancestral healing allows humans to find themselves first within their lineages and encourages the gentle untying of knots so that each and every soul may be nourished and cared for.

“...should Véronique be dead.” 2023. materials: grave rubbing crayon on muslin, acorn tannin, iron oxide