Artists

Leidy Churchman

Press release

In Inner Dialogue, Leidy Churchman’s first show at Galerie Chantal Crousel, images from previous exhibitions come back around amid new narratives, vantages, and technologies. Taken together, the paintings index the everyday in order to transcend it, making the real spiritual, the material magical, and showing us what it’s like to see, feel, and live in this particular moment. Here, the potent energy of an idea becomes an animal, a sign becomes a refuge, a feeling state a shade of blue, a credit card a meditation on death and transformation; everyday sights and sensations are first themselves and then so much more than themselves. With deft and evocative brushwork, Churchman works with figuration as a means to abstract—to help us to see beyond what we see—translating Buddhist concepts, symbols, and stories into familiar and unfamiliar compositions. In this way, paint becomes a spiritual medium, a mechanism to mediate spirit, flow, birth, death, and life continuously into and out of the frame.