A Project Room Exhibition

Opening Reception: May 2, 2025 | 6–9pm

On view: August 16—November 8, 2025

---

The objects in v. nico d’entremont’s Spiritual Technologies emerge from practices rooted in Sicilian Folk Magic to address subjects of intergenerational trauma and gendered violence.  Believing that “intergenerational trauma” has existed long before this term was coined, the artist proposes that in various cultural contexts, we could better understand and even heal this phenomenon as a generational “curse.” Following the death of their maternal grandmother in 2018, d’entremont began researching ancestral practices from the island of Sicily for casting and releasing a curse.

The artist came across a description of an object created for the purpose of casting a curse; an account of its discovery in the home of its mark, and the steps by which the curse was released through the incineration of the object. Adapting these instructions to their studio practice, d’entremont developed Made Real by Process of Annihilation. In this ongoing series of burnout castings, objects are created to metaphorically and metaphysically embody the artist’s persistent intergenerational traumas and then transformed through incineration, leaving behind an uncanny substitution, cast in bronze.

 

“Sicilian magic stabs its threats and jeers into an egg or a lemon, a potato or even a piece of meat” 

—By-paths in Sicily, 1920