HETEROTOPIA (2014-present)
The title of this new series is derived from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s essay “Des Espaces Autres” in which he uses the term “heterotopia” to describe “spaces of otherness” that are “neither here nor there,” such as the moment one sees himself in the mirror, or gardens, which represent truly ambiguous and contradictory spaces where nature and artifice collide in a form of utopia.
For the past decade I have investigated the notion of space – not only as a physical or geographical place, but also as a mental or imaginary space – and our relationship to the environment, between the natural and the artificial. The images in this series were photographed in various private and public gardens in the United States and Europe. The distortions, superimpositions and colors are not the result of digital manipulation; they were created in camera and with reflective surfaces, using the natural environment as both a plein air studio and the subject matter. The colors, contributing to a vision of enhanced or transformed reality, act as a vehicle to translate a world in transition, oscillating between a psychedelic vision of nature and a toxic and artificial post-natural world.
Heterotopia was partly inspired by writer J. G. Ballard, particularly his fantasy novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), which I was reading when I started to work on the project.
Artificial by Nature continues the artist’s long exploration of distorted realities and altered perceptions, resulting in manipulations of light and color as sophisticated as they are seductive.
The gallery’s main space features selections from Laval’s “Heterotopia,” a series of densely layered photographs of gardens and other manicured “natural” environments. Placing sheets of glass and one- and two-way mirrors in the composition, and employing skewed perspectives and extreme crops, the images in “Heterotopia” are suffused with the luminescence of stained-glass windows while possessing the uncanny charm of movie stills or extraterrestrial landscapes. Tiny stems appear tall as trees, while empty space fills up with clouds of color that swirl with the celestial movement of nebulas. Yet there are often traces of the unmanipulated scene left in the frame, reminding viewers that this is in fact a familiar world, and the only thing that’s changed is the way it’s perceived. Light, which we’re accustomed to think of as the medium we see through, is revealed for what it is: the medium that brings the images to our eyes, and that possesses layers far richer than what we normally see.
On view in the project room are selections from “Black Palms,” a series of images of Los Angeles palm trees, shot from below and solarized, leaving behind vast black fields jaggedly slashed with silver etchings. The zigzag tracings of the palm leaves recall photograms or the stylized manipulations of light in film noir (in which many of these trees once featured), while the inky gloss of the images simultaneously reflects viewers’ gaze and sucks them into an interstellar vastness. But as with the images in “Heterotopia,” the quotidian reality is discernible, leaving viewers with the uneasy yet uplifting suggestion that the world is what we think it is only because of long-held and often-unconscious patterns of association. There is always more to see.