APRIL 27 – JUNE 8, 2022

Opening Reception with the Artist
Wednesday, April 27, 6 – 8 PM
421 Providence Road

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Trembling Giant, a solo exhibition by artist Karine Laval. The gallery will host a public opening reception with the artist on April 27, 2022 from 6 - 8 PM. This will be Laval’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Laval’s new body of work continues her ongoing exploration of our relationship to nature and of space as both physical or geographical and imaginary. Her pigment prints are composite landscapes of natural shapes and radical manipulation of light. The artist focuses on abstracting the experiences of memory, narrative and everyday life. The resulting imagery becomes a bridge between the world we live in and a more surreal, dreamlike dimension, which depicts a disorienting representation of nature. Her approach is rooted in experimentations harking back to 20th century avant-garde and surrealism that explore the limits of the medium and engage a dialog with other mediums such as painting, moving images and performance. The distortions, superimpositions and otherworldly colors are created in camera as single frames using reflective surfaces, natural and artificial light, skewed perspectives and at times extreme crops. Each layer of her photographs transposes the position of her lens, leaving the viewer blissfully unaware of which way is up or down.

In Trembling Giant, Laval captures Pando, a unique ecosystem located in Fishlake National Forest in Utah, which was featured in the Voyages Issue of The New York Times Magazine in 2018. The ancient forest, connected by one intertwined root system, is believed to be the largest and most dense organism ever found and is estimated to have started at the end of the last ice age. The Pando clone, Latin for “I spread”, spreads over 106 acres with over 40,000 individual trees. As the wind moves through their leaves, the trees tremble and produce a unique and ethereal sound, collectively becoming the Trembling Giant.

Laval’s imagery is a visual representation of the wind rustling the leaves in this ancient forest. The sense of movement, with a mixture of stills and video, collapses time and place for the viewer – dreamlike dimensions result where nature becomes another reality. Cool blues and purples and unearthly tones mark this transcendence, and a new world is created where nature is omnipresent and all encompassing. Living beings appear here and there, a deer, a face, but they are frozen in time, spellbound by the motion of the trees and the sound of the leaves.

In Trembling Giant, Laval invites us to dive into a magical forest through an immersive installation of wallcoverings, stills and moving images with a soundscape by artist Jeff Rice.

Karine Laval (France, B. 1971)

Karine Laval (b. 1971, France) is a French American Brooklyn-based artist. She graduated from the CELSA - Paris Sorbonne in France, where she majored in communications and journalism. A self-taught artist, she completed her art, photography and design education through evening and weekend courses at the School of Visual Arts and the New School in New York.

Laval has worked on commissions for prestigious brands such as Hermès and Louis Vuitton, architects and institutions. Some of her recent public art commissions include a monumental scale installation at 22 Bishopsgate in London, an exhibition of large lightboxes in the New York City subway, and an art commission by Peter Marino for the Cheval Blanc hotel in the newly renovated La Samaritaine in Paris. In the summer of 2022, she will present a public art installation of her work throughout the parks and gardens of the national museum of Château de Malmaison outside Paris. 

In view of the variety of her exhibition venues this past decade, Laval is an artist interested in sharing her work outside the walls of the white box, playing on the boundaries between public space and private space, leisure areas and transit areas, or places of contemplation and places of consumption. Her work is aimed both at informed audiences who come specially to see it and at the many people who come across her installations by chance. Thanks to the originality of her gaze and her talent as a colorist, she has become a master in capturing the attention of passers-by and plunges them unexpectedly into her surreal and luxuriant universe. Whether it is the place where her images arise or the expression of her singular gaze on a familiar environment, Laval illustrates how emotion is in the unexpected.

Her work has been reviewed and featured in international publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, Le Monde, Eyemazing, Next Level, EXIT, to name a few. Her work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. Notable recent group exhibitions include ‘Peter Marino Collection’ at Peter Marino Art Foundation in Southampton, NY in 2021, ‘IN VIVO/The nature of nature’ at Museum Belvédère in The Netherlands in 2018, and ‘Obsessions’ at Maison Particulière in Brussels (Belgium) and ‘Radical Color’ at the Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, OR (USA) in 2015. Laval is the recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant and was nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2016 and 2019. Steidl published her first monograph Poolscapes in 2018 and 89books published Anatomy of Desire in 2019.