Bernini’s Vomit In collaboration with Richard Purdy

Carmelo Arnoldin
Richard Purdy

March 2002

Toronto based sculptor Carmelo Arnoldin has been working on an epic project for the last twelve years: a non-denominational church for the next millenium called Mille. Fabricating the church in a piecemeal fashion he has constructed giant wooden doors and other architectural elements that are key to his vision of a monument to the end of our millenium.

“In Bernini’s Vomit Arnoldin and Purdy drop a giant, Baroque-style altar-niche onto the gallery floor and invite us to read this orphaned lump of architecture as sculpture... We tend to treat classical architecture as somehow ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ almost as the default condition for Western buildings—but if you take it completely out of context, as Arnoldin and Purdy have done, you realize just how unnatural and abstract a language it really speaks.”
(Blake Gopnick)