Opening Reception: Friday, August 15 | 6–9PM

On view: August 16—November 8, 2025

“Sicilian magic stabs its threats and jeers into an egg or a lemon, a potato or even a piece of meat.”
—Eliza Putnam Heaton, By-paths in Sicily 1920

The objects in v. nico d’entremont’s Spiritual Technologies emerge from practices rooted in Sicilian folk magic. Their work addresses subjects of intergenerational trauma, gendered violence and the desire for embodied Transgender liberation in this fraught political moment. Through sculptures that combine fragmented human and tree limbs, they explore how bodies are shaped by trauma, and the way that gendered violence is hidden in the archive of their own corporeal form.

Adapting practices used in Sicilian protection magic, Catholic mysticism and pre-colonial spiritual traditions that survive in the undercurrents of Christianity, d’entremont develops rituals for individual and community healing. Spiritual objects and relics from the artist’s emerging cosmology are presented in this gallery using anthropological display methods that have been “queered” through living, corrosive, or otherwise fugitive material. Through these references, d’entremont reminds viewers that the gallery exhibition is but a sanitized and abbreviated glimpse of the feral wilds that exist within their studio and expanded practice.

The artwork in Spiritual Technologies was developed over the past year with support from fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo and Art Omi. Additional thanks to Amanda Kressler, Clint Baclawski, Lenard Smith and Marcel Marcel for production support.

 

Opening Reception 

Friday, August 15, 2025 | 6–9 PM

BCA Mills Gallery, 551 Tremont St., Boston, MA 02116

I am a transdisciplinary artist, examining poetic entanglements across the veil of life and death.  Through installation, experimental documentary, ritual/performances, inter-species collaborations and socially-engaged practice, I continually seek counter-narratives.  My work interrogates systemic concerns through personal narrative, challenging preconceived notions of queerness, disability and “otherness,” while complicating perceptions of the institutions that dominate our lives.  

My expanded practice blurs the edges of studio art, academic research, spiritual practice and embodied ways of knowing. Since 2018, research into early Catholic mystics and pre-colonial spiritual traditions that survive in the undercurrents of Christianity has driven my work.  More recently, I explore queer collective care, individual healing, and the unexpected emergence of embodied trauma during gender transition.  Through my socially-engaged practice, community members are invited into participation and mutual support, seeking collective liberation through healing personal and community trauma. 

Commissions, solo exhibitions and residencies include: Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Commonwealth & Council, MacDowell, Yaddo, BANFF, The Joan Mitchell Center, Art Omi, Lighthouse Works, ACRE, SPACES Cleveland, The Berwick Research Institute and a Boston Center for the Arts Studio Residency. Grants and fellowships received have included a 2012 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, 2016 Social Practice Art award and 2024 Collective Futures Fund grant.