ABOUT THE ARTIST
Michael Darmody earned his Master of Fine Arts degree at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, a hotbed of 80’s postmodern art praxis. Since moving to the Southwest in 1989, first to the Navajo Nation Reservation, then to Farmington, New Mexico, he has concentrated on deconstructing the “Myth of the West”, especially as embodied in the tourist-industry-specific “Noble Savage Experience”.
To that end Darmody has taken advantage of the endless tokens associated with said industry, among them Indian souvenir postcards, “End-of-the-Trail” trinkets, etc., and used them against themselves. In 2012, the state of New Mexico’s Arts Division commissioned his House of Cards, a temporary installation consisting of a mix of 3,600 real and fake Indian souvenir postcards, covering all four walls of NMAD’s Centennial Project Space, in the Plaza, Santa Fe, one of seven such artworks marking the state’s centennial. Once entering the space, viewers were literally surrounded by thousands of ersatz Chiefs, Medicine Men and Maidens, with no visible means of escape (even the doors and outlets were covered by postcards).
Darmody's work also calls attention to the disconnect between "The Land", sold to us as sublime, regenerative nature, and actual land, serving us as commodity, resource for wealth and power. Among other projects, he has proposed resurveying the location of the Four Corners Monument, noting that it is in the "wrong" spot, according to all four states' respective constitutions, and he has proposed replacing the English name of the 1,400-foot pinnacle known as “Shiprock” with a new, improved English name, based on a popularity poll.
In 2015, Darmody's Night Vision series featured images of extraction industry equipment coal mine dragline shovels, gas well pump jacks, electricity transmission towers, etc., reimagined as ghosts haunting the Southwest.
August 2015, THE LAND/an art site, an arts organization that makes its undeveloped 40-acre lot in a subdivision southeast of Albuquerque available to artists who wish to work directly with the land to explore the human relationship to nature, invited Darmody to produce his Centerline project, an open-ended attempt to compile an exhaustive inventory of the parcel, including, but not limited to, its animal and plant taxonomy, political and legal status, human occupational history - pretty much everything that reflects what humans project onto “The Land”.
Darmody considers himself the child of cynics Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol on one side and romantics Robert Smithson and Bill Viola on the other. Among his siblings he counts Bas Jan Ader, Gerhard Richter and Eva Hesse. Crazy uncles include Robert Venturi and Michel Foucault. There are about a hundred artists on his “Top Ten” list.
Michael Darmody lives and works in Farmington, NM.
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