Karine Laval Studio

The Wanderers (2002-2012) was commissioned by NYCAMS for the exhibition [ON SILENCE] celebrating John Cage’s Centennial in 2012 and inspired by John Cage’s writing on silence and his seminal piece 4’33”. The neutral, monochromatic piece seems empty of content at first look and somehow elicits the idea of silence. The imperfections on the surface – scratches and white spots – are like the manifestation of white noise and become an invitation to look more closely, in a similar way that the purpose of Cage’s silent piece was to make people listen.

Exhibition catalog (cover and artist page)

Curator: Janna Dyk

June 14-25, 2012, NYCAMS Gallery (New York Center for Art & Media Studies) 

The Chelsea Music Festival is pleased to present [ON SILENCE], a group exhibition of New York-based artists whose work addresses the concept of silence in visual art, using the peculiar juxtaposition of two distinctly diverse texts on silence: Silence, by premier Japanese novelist Shusako Endo, and the compilation of lectures by the late American composer and theorist John Cage of the same title. Via such modes as erasure, negative space, covering, absence, pause, and the like, the works, which include analog and digital photography, painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and mixed media, and many of which were realized specifically for this exhibition, address the psychological, spiritual, and spatial implications of silence.

Installation view at NYCAMS

Mixed media installation mural at NYCAMS

Dimensions: 76x52”, 16 panel inkjet pigment prints, stitched together with archival artist tape, Unique piece with 3 variations (and 1 AP)

Installation view at NYCAMS

Original silver gelatin print (2002)

"My work often addresses the notion of space and the relationship we entertain with space and our environment, especially with the natural landscape and the element of water. This work is drawn from my own relationship to water and the meditative state I experience from surfing when I surrender to the weight of the ocean. Time feels suspended, space boundless and infinite, my body weightless and my mind silenced. I see the work bearing an affiliation with German Romanticism and the transcendental relationship between the individual and nature.

However, this project also explores the physicality of the photograph and my interest in going beyond the limitations and boundaries of the medium and its connection to depicting reality. It is part of a broader series of works investigating the dialog between different mediums (photography, painting, video and music), and how the information and emotions are transmitted between analog and digital. Through a series of processes (from the initial analog capture of the image through the lens of the camera onto film to digital manipulations through the lens of the scanner to a series of enlargement and fragmentation using my Epson printer), I am trying to address a paradox by inverting the "revelation" process inherent to photography through a succession of "erasures". The apparent seams of the panels, taped together to recompose the final image, heighten the effect, fracturing the landscape - and the image - even further. The impermanence of the photograph, echoed by the poetic dreaminess and raw grittiness of the image, thus becomes a metaphor for the impermanence of the natural world and the human soul."

Detail from The Wanderers

Reverse Silence (stills from video installation by Karine Laval)

View excerpts from the video installation performance at NYCAMS here: https://vimeo.com/42668072

March 30th, 2012 at NYCAMS
Curated by Janna Aliese Dyk

Reverse Silence is a live collaborative performance featuring a video installation by French artist Karine Laval with sound and music improvisation by jazz composer and trombonist James Hall, experimental composer and cellist Meaghan Burke, woodwind player Aaron Kruziki, and live transmission artist Morgan O’Hara.

A nod to the centennial of composer and musician John Cage’s writings on Silence, the performance debuted the silent film installation “Reverse” by Karine Laval. The event itself becomes a reversal of Cageian silence. Laval’s film installation is a video animation of stills projected onto the wall of the gallery, mirrored and distorted by a reflective surface installed onto the floor by the artist. Absent of acoustic sound, the video installation serves as the instigation for the collaborative moment, as in turn Hall, Burke, and Kruziki separately create live compositions of sound in response to viewing the silent images.  O’Hara, whose acclaimed drawings serve as “a record, performed in real time, of the vital movement of living beings,” composes a live transmission drawing of the musicians’ interactions with Laval’s work. In this manner, the visual art is both the initiation and the summation for a dialogue on the subject of silence. 

Detail of the installation by Karine Laval

“Reverse is a meditative journey through time, place and perception. Composed of a series of still images of water reflections of landscapes, the video invites the viewer to reflect on the paradoxical nature of time perception – fleeting and suspended – and the transient state of nature.” – Karine Laval