Please join us for a special presentation by Oklahoma based artist and poet Angie LaPaglia. Her newest installation, Passages, is currently featured on the 2nd floor at 21c Museum Hotel as part of Elevate at 21c. LaPaglia will focus on the power of collaboration in art, and the small army of people it took to bring this project together. After the talk, she will lead guests up to the second-floor installation, where she will read a short poem.

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ARTIST STATEMENT
This piece was inspired by the space it now inhabits, and it was inspired by you who also inhabits this space, if only briefly. You are, after all, passing through. Your presence here is temporary. What brought you here? A celebration? An opportunity? A birth? A death?

Love, loss, beginnings, endings: each is a passage of life.

Out of this paper passage are carved lines of poetry taken from passages in my own life. As the sun travels the window each day, it casts temporary and ever-moving shadows across the floor, across the paper, and across you. In this way the sun, the shadows, and the words are all passing through, just like you are.

Finally, it occurs to me that the elegant curve of the paper set within the stark lines of the corridor and the window creates a tension that is not unlike the tension experienced as we walk through life’s passages.

As you walk through this temporary paper passage, I hope you will contemplate your own passages, acknowledge them as temporary, and find peace.

Image: Angie LaPaglia (American; Oklahoma), Passages, 2018. Paper, red oak, steel cable.