The Tenri Cultural Institute proudly presents Angiola Churchill: Paradise Revisited, a site specific solo installation. Churchill can be described as a contemporary artist who works in the minimalist aesthetic of Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. Not only does she create site specific work that is monumental, but she dares to be irreverent in the placement of her ephemeral paper sculptures that also controvert traditional notions of permanence. Churchill has studied and earned degrees from the Tyler School of Fine Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, at Cooper Union, New York, and at the Teacher’s College of Columbia University, where she earned her doctorate.
Churchill started her artistic career as a painter, and developed through cubism but left it behind in the early 70s to move onto the use of natural forms and installation sculpture. Around 1974, she restricted herself to neutral tones and created her first white paper installations, which have become her trademark. Her incorporation of modular constructions, serial repetitions and her use of the grid result in complex installation works. While her works are loaded with personal, symbolical and metaphorical significance, where all images and themes evolve from private mythologies, their meaning can only be captured intuitively.
Tenri Cultural Institute is a non-profit organization founded in 1991. The mission of the Institute is to promote the study of Japanese language, the appreciation of international art forms, and to foster understanding and harmony in the community.
Through its diverse programs, the Institute hopes to draw together the multi-ethnic people of New York City to engage in cross-cultural dialogue and exchange.
Artist Statement
The visual discourse in this exhibit can be seen in terms of the human body as it moves in a complex articulation with itself in relation to all other living things in nature. Parts combine into hybrids, organic symbols, attesting to the parallelism existing between human and non-human life. Slipping in and out of each other, they spread onto waxed paper in vertical hangings, suggesting a living skin and firming a huge erogenous zone. Within a structure in which lyricism and abstraction are coupled, the multiple layering causes spatial ambiguities and unresolved meanings. On the walls, the symbols are organized in horizontal bands surrounding the space of the gallery like a garden wall. The glimmering of light shining on the walls and fused into the installation instills a metaphoric calm in which a moment of peaceful unification with nature is held in abeyance.