Opening Reception: Friday, August 15 | 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 

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.