Exhibition Statement
As an Australian-born artist who spent the majority of her childhood in Spain and the US, Evangeline Cachinero’s work negotiates a culturally elusive dialogue between integration and detachment. She is most comfortable living within this ambiguity, navigating the diametric tension of the space between things: student/teacher, figuration/abstraction, harmony/discordance, art/craft, order/chaos, physical/digital, earthly/metaphysical, joy/anxiety. By leaning into the in-betweenness of disparate ideas, Cachinero taps into an active energy.
She is known for her vibrant paintings, digital installations and detailed textiles that fuse together multiple interests. She has a wide material vernacular that includes painting, drawing, textiles, sculpture, photography, digital art, and video. The artist’s fluidity between materials and interests expresses a world of simultaneity and ordered chaos.
With strong ties to Andalucia and the US, Cachinero has been drawn to art from the Iberian peninsula and American folk art, especially La Mezquita which inspired an interest in art made for religious purposes including idols, monuments, temples, churches, shrines and ritual. She has a specific interest in what she calls ‘engineered spirituality’ where she fosters spiritual experiences through art in an effort to find a path towards healing humanity.
Divine Discontent is a solo exhibition that speaks to the chronic dissatisfaction of the artist. It is this unease with one’s work, and perhaps to a wider extent one’s life, that propels us into a life of service to art. In this service, we might seek deeper meaning, need answers, surrender to the meditative prayer-like world of art labor, try to move humanity forward toward a new vision, or attempt to heal.