Angiola Churchill @ the Palazzo Fortuni,Venice
Dana Zeman
In her recent Venice exhibition, Beyond the Garden, Angiola Churchill filled
the Venice gallery of Palazzo Fortuni with white papers patterned into labyrinths,
personages, gates, and fountains, floating from above. The garden functions as
a totality. The papers are luminous as they interact with the dark surrounding
space. Even the shadows on the floor are an extension of the piece. The detailed
works function within a larger three-room structure, harkening to a balance found
in classical architecture. The exhibition is praised for this aesthetic cohesion.
It is likewise fitting to write about Beyond the Garden as an entirety, including
both the finished product and the informative complexity of its making.
The first room
of the exhibit contains a 12’ x 12’ white labyrinth, comprised of many
labyrinths hanging together in the surrounding darkness. “Labyrinth,”
describes Churchill, “represents the course of your own life – the
development of who you are. It represents essentially how you purify yourself
to be the best you can be by going through the various hurdles.”1
In my experience,
the lessons of the labyrinths were evident in their creation, months before the
show took place. Students, friends, and colleagues eagerly pitched in to glue
layers of paper and cut them into strips so they could later be woven into these
intricate structures. Six hours of work amounted to one labyrinth, and there
were hundreds to go. A student of Churchill’s from NYU said to me, while
agilely folding papers, that he needed this labyrinth, it helped him. I felt
the same way. The work was meditative, as were the walls of Churchill’s
perfectly white studio shone with natural light. Meanwhile, there was a war on
the horizon and public fear of attacks. Invited into this alternative space,
were we already inside the garden?
The next room of
the exhibition, the enclosed garden, contains a monumental hanging fountain of
paper water falling “from heaven” to the ground. “The fountains
and the water sources,” explains Churchill, “all come from Eden.”2
There is a garden gate, and inside are paper ladies, each with a different pattern
to her sheet-like dress. “The idea,” says Churchill, “is that
they’re like sheets of history, pages of a book that tells us various parts
of our culture.” 3
Like the labyrinth,
the efforts of the garden were tremendous. The fountain was hung, taken down,
then hung again. The beautiful circles dangling from the ceiling warped at first,
and Churchill had to search for new reeds and re-make each mandala. Nothing was
sacrificed for convenience, and the gardeners pressed on until the opening reception.
The last room of
the exhibition is the “room without a name.” Churchill explains, “I
wanted expansion, to be released from this place and going someplace else…
to this unknown place.” Churchill describes the garden as a manifestation
of how, “we’ve formed ourselves through centuries.” Yet it leads
into a nameless space where “we have a sense of not knowing what we’re
going to turn into.”4 Churchill laid a piece of paper on the floor of the
room, not yet molded, as if to ask, what will we do with this material and the
space it lays in?
Beyond the Garden
is ethereal and luminous, but it is also made of the things here on earth. In
addition to the usual foibles of hanging a show, war had just broken out, and
there were worries calling from home. Thanks to Churchill’s determination,
hundreds of people have the opportunity to visit the gallery and dwell in a garden
that emanates the prospect of something lighter.
“We have this
big brain,” says Churchill, “with all these possibilities of making
connections – but we get lost. We get stuck in the labyrinth.”5 But
we don’t have to. We have this nameless room and materials that wait to
be formed by our hands. What is beyond the garden of what we already know? That
is for us to decide.
1 Personal communication, April 26, 2003.
2 Personal communication, May 1st, 2002.
3 Personal communication, April 26th, 2003.
4 Personal communication, April 26th, 2003.
5 Personal communication, April 26th, 2003.
