“The Great Escape,” Karine Laval’s new photography Lightbox exhibition installed at the 42 St-Bryant Park (B,D,F,M,7) station, is a tribute to the naturaL world and brings the artist's quiet garden moments into the subway station below blooming Bryant Park. In the Spring of 2020 during the Covid-19 quarantine, Laval found refuge in her Brooklyn backyard. As she grew more attentive to her own small garden, meditating on the details became a cathartic process. Doing most of her experimentation in the camera, she created new images using sheets of mirrored glass to form layered reflections, merging fantasy with reality. In her colorscapes, Laval plays with nature’s patterns, colors, and light to create alternate realities and a new way of seeing urban nature. Laval first printed these lush images on her home printer and displayed them on the fence of her backyard, exposed to the natural elements.

Then as a way to bring community together, invited people to view the work hanging among the plants. The same images of beauty found and created during an unforgettable moment in time, were enlarged and set within the subway station, surrounded by all of the renewed energy of a reopened, reactivated New York City. The exhibit was generously sponsored by Griffin Editions and Kodak Professional.