Secret Basement Lab: Eye On Art: Dominick Di Meo

I first came to know about Dominick Di Meo in 2019, when I visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art's showing of work by artists associated with the Hairy Who collective from Chicago. You can see pictures from that visit here. I don't believe that Di Meo was part of the Hairy Whos, at least not formally, but rather was living in Chicago around the same time, making him more of an accomplice-in-art than a group participant.

Whatever the case may be, when I first saw his piece Untitled (Red line with heads) (above) it smacked me square in the attention zone and held it for quite a while. The juxtaposition of the mask-like, almost skeletal faces floating around the amorphous background, and the red hot laser beam of color shooting across the otherwise gloomy canvas seemed so intriguing in the presence of all of the pop colors and very precisely dictated forms of all of the other pieces on display.

Even if Di Meo's aim isn't to necessarily produce something aesthetically ghoulish or sinister, there's definitely a haunting, otherworldly vibe to it. Maybe it has something to do with all of those ghostly not-quite-skulls silently moaning in three dimensions from his canvases and sculptural pieces. Of course if you do even a cursory web search on the artist, you'll be told first and foremost, repeatedly, as if it's the only thing anyone has to say about the guy, that he spent a fair amount of time during his formative years in a polio ward, which is credited as the source of his darkly askew output.

Another common visual in his work is the collage of common household objects, usually presented in a jumble, and rarely as true representations of those items but rather as hazy absences of them; almost as if someone took an x-ray of a junk drawer and transferred the negative image to canvas. You can see what I mean with the assemblage of scissors, bits of string and other household junk floating within the menacing amoebic form in the 1973 piece Untitled (face on yellow) below (from the Corbett vs. Dempsey website here). Are these the commingled specters of the items we consider garbage but refuse to wholly part with, confronting the viewer to let them know that they may have been confined to a darkened drawer somewhere, but that they do in fact still exist and can still serve a purpose (for if they couldn't, would they have been kept around in the first place)? Is that somehow related to the artist's interment in a polio ward as a child? No idea.

Whatever it is that drives Dominick Di Meo to produce the art that he does, I am a definite fan of the output. He eventually found his way back to New York where he continues to live and make art. Collected below are some more of my favorite Dominick Di Meo pieces.