(continued...) Born in Southern California, he now works and resides in Missoula, Montana.  As an artist he has participated numerous exhibits that promote awareness of such issues as AIDS, breast cancer, environmental and other social issues.  De Meng is co-founder of Missoula’s Festival of the Dead, an annual event based on the Latin Dia de los Muertos designed to celebrate life, death and the arts, through education, performance, and visual arts. As an educator, he offers a variety of mixed media workshops throughout the country and over the years has actively involved with VSA Montana.  Through these activities, as well as his artwork, de Meng fosters community awareness, and offers creative methods to explore the human experience.

Artist Statement:

My work is about transformations.  It is about the transformation of the common into the sacred.    Discarded materials find new and unexpected uses in my work; they are reassembled and conjoined with unlikely components, a form of rebirth from the ashes into new life and new meaning.   These assemblages are metaphors for the evolutions and revolutions of existence:  from life to death to rebirth, from new to old to renewed, from construction to destruction to reconstruction.  These forms are examinations of the world in perpetual flux, where meaning and function are ever changing.