Multimedia artist Michael Deyermond has spent the past thirty years trying to paint a poem, and to enshrine language as sculpture. His newest series of hand-painted books, the bed the book the woman the drug, offers an antidote to the digital age, where books have become bytes and romance depends on devices.
The show’s titular piece, with Deyermond’s caustic words framing and intersticing the cover of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, looks like a religious tome. This work provides a narrative framework for the entire show: this is a story about condemnation and salvation, though not necessarily in that order. This exhibition explores the embodied and entangled relationships between vice and virtue, abjection and exaltation. On a biography of painter Philip Guston appear the words painting smoking heartbreaking, each term accompanied by a wilting illustration. On the red cover of a Wallace Berman exhibition catalog, i came so close to god i thought it was art is emblazoned in gold. As writer Shana Nys Dambrot said of Deyermond’s first book series in a 2005 review for The Magazine, these augmented covers feature “brassy synopses that both personalize and subvert the nobility of the masterpieces so defined.” The result is a choral effect—a painfully personal and entirely universal library.
Poet, former bookstore owner and part-time vagabond in Venice, California, Deyermond makes drawings and rough-hewn wooden sculptures inscribed with bare bones aphorisms that expose a brittle, yet persevering soul. His work addresses the California promise, wicked realities of unfulfilled dreams, and bitter truths of longing and commitment in relationships.