The Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is presenting the Southeastern debut of Abigail DeVille’s Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet) (2025), an immersive, gallery-sized installation that evokes the burning of Richmond in 1865.
On view through August 18, the work is a vast assemblage of charred Colonial-style cabinets inspired by photographs of Richmond in flames during the final days of the Civil War. It was commissioned for the widely praised MONUMENTS exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in collaboration with The Brick.
“In the MONUMENTS exhibition, Deo Vindice was situated among decommissioned Confederate statuary and other artworks that interrogate the unresolved legacies of Lost Cause revisionism and myth-making,” notes exhibition curator Amber Esseiva, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA. “Presenting the work here in Richmond allows us to continue that essential inquiry into power, erasure, and public memory in the historically charged context our location provides.”
As Union forces prepared to take Richmond in April 1865, Southern officials ordered the city’s warehouses burned to stop munitions and the railway foundry Tredegar Iron Works from being captured. Less than a week later, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, bringing the war to a close.
Historically, curio cabinets have functioned as symbols of status, particularly in the South, where they protected and displayed family heirlooms. In the installation, DeVille groups the cabinets to indicate the principal stars of Orion, the constellation named for the hunter in Greek mythology who angered Gaia by promising to kill every animal on earth. Through this framework, she links Orion’s drive to dominate with the Confederacy’s pursuit of white supremacy and hegemonic power, even at the cost of destroying their own communities.
The ragged, cloth-draped scaffolding connecting the cabinets resembles the kind used in monument restoration, evoking structures that have sheltered and preserved distorted versions of history and helped keep them standing despite decades of scholarship disproving those myths. Deo Vindice (Orion’s Cabinet) is curated by Amber Esseiva, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the ICA, with Kennedy Jones, Curatorial Assistant. The installation remains on view through August 18, 2026.
For more information, visit icavcu.org.
