http://www.karinelavalstudio.com/work daily 1.0 2026-01-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1391737364136-SMD5XWKDU06O64LOEOX0/Rebellious-Slave-dechire-1.jpg Projects Rebellious Slave #7, 2012 Mix-media collage, 13x19”, unique Projected larger format: approx. 42x61” (work in progress), unique (with 2 variations) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1391736869968-YEZNPL2T412CH14NJF2Y/LAVAL-01.jpg Projects An image that is grainy, indistinct, or dispersed over the surface of the screen invites a haptic look, or a look that uses the eye like an organ of touch. – Laura U. Marks in “Loving a Disappearing Image” Link to the installation Anatomy of Desire at Theaterlab NYC (March 2015) Link to video White Nights https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1462123095674-WOJC6H9BW131AAJ8Z4D2/Poolscape-01.jpg Projects - Poolscapes (2009-2012) Poolscape #1, 2009, 48x48" c-print (also available in 30x30") In Poolscapes Laval revisits a familiar subject, the swimming pool. Although continuing to employ a highly saturated palette with tightly composed imagery, this new series marks a departure from her previous work – The Pool – in both tone and depth. The images take the viewer through levels of dream-like reflections, painterly layers that oscillate between abstraction and representation. These large scale tableaux serve not as mere illustrations of the physical experience of the water or the leisure it usually represents, but rather use form, color and texture to depict a world on the edge of the real and surreal. Here, swimming pools act as a metaphor, a mirror whose surface reflects the surrounding world but is also a gate into another - dreamlike - world, a sort of mise en abyme. Consequently, the distorted bodies and landscapes begin to echo physical dissolutions and shifting states of mind as the water blurs the threshold between the mundane and the sublime. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1462125098844-2O0AQ3BBCACCJ3KBYKO3/pool-07.jpg Projects - The Pool (2002-2005) Untitled #7, 2002, 30x30" c-print (also available in 20x20") In The Pool series Laval utilizes photography's ability to create visual narratives which echo moments from her childhood. The choice of a unified color palette, with saturated and bleached-out tones, is reminiscent of the qualities of super-8 home movies and reinforces the ambiguous relation between reality and fiction. Beyond her personal memory Laval is also trying to reveal a collective memory through the common and universal experience of leisure and bathing. She's also interested in the notion of space and the relationship we entertain with the environment in which we live. Swimming pools and beach resorts represent a dominant theme of modern life in our culture and mix the natural element of water with the cultural and social element of a manmade environment. Although the activities and expressions of the bathers are familiar and spontaneous, the scenes captured by Laval appear to be composed by a silent choreographer when moments are isolated and frozen within the frame of the camera. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1495645443354-XYUDG0WL2KM449F3RYTN/Black-Palms-01.jpg Projects BLACK PALMS Black Palms is 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 were 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.   Untitled #1, 2014   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1678822660929-EXF44QL3KVE5PVX84TNY/image.jpg Projects - Trembling Giant Trembling Giant 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1678829490301-PUUF0Z3AH77IBNAYPYUG/image-asset.jpeg Projects - Landscape Refractions / Réfractions Paysagères New series and exhibition commissioned by the castle of Malmaison in Paris. Karine Laval created new images in the gardens of the castle of Malmaison and in the park Bois Préau outside Paris during an artist residency in the summer of 2021. The following year she conceived a public art installation and exhibition throughout the parc Bois Préau, and the gardens and castle of Malmaison from May through September 2022. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1403800265751-GZSH2S5ZFZXLZK5QV1WV/photogram003-cropped.jpg Projects - Eclipses The series Eclipses continues my investigation of the making of the image and its relationship to surface and the physical qualities of the picture. The series also explores ways to make tangible an immaterial element, which is essential to photography and lens-based mediums: light. Through a mix of analog and digital manipulations – including experimentations in the darkroom and with the scanner, I create abstract images where the initial subject recorded on the negative becomes obstructed or near-erased by the different layers of process involved. I also physically alter the image by crumpling and creasing the paper and scanning the resulting object unflatten, allowing light leaks and reflections to leave additional marks (in addition to finger prints and dust residues) and further transform the final image. Some of the images are reassembled in Photoshop using the Layer Mask tool and transparencies. The title, which refers to the temporary obscuring phenomenon resulting from a solar eclipse, serves as a metaphor for the obscuring and concealment of the indexical images by new layers of information – mostly abstract forms and colors – resulting from the process. I have also produced a series of short videos by animating the still images and using similar techniques of layering, in some cases recycling and mixing previous video footage. The moving images are reminiscent of fading and disintegrating old films, pointing to the death of the analog medium but also suggesting the evanescence of the digital image. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1419959405397-Y16GONEAOIWONQNJDLNB/Heterotopia-02.jpg Projects 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1603212760106-3IBTI0UTFVMD9VYHBJN3/image.jpg Projects - "The Great Escape" video tour “The Great Escape” is an exhibition of new works produced by Karine Laval in her Brooklyn garden during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. The unusual outdoor installation features photographs printed by Laval on-site with her own Epson printer, casually pinned to the fences of her garden. The artist has left the works on paper intentionally exposed to the elements. The photographs, battered and seasoned by rain, wind and scorch sun are in constant transformation, taking a life of their own. The exhibition was reviewed by Barry Schwabsky in the Artforum issue of October/November 2020. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1756220817461-E2J72DTVYZXNJIYZPI70/KL-Cosmos-Dior.jpg Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1391732224095-NQQQ7ZQZYK6YMKPLNBJ1/karine_laval7.jpg Projects   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1391791698879-0EPMH4IPGB1VZ3H02XIS/Silence002small-coverweb.jpg Projects - [ ON SILENCE ] 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. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1391796810894-Q00Y4CY2XLTIYTHCPHX9/IMG_2711.jpg Projects CHROMASCAPES This new body of work comprises a series of videos and unique pigment prints translating data and emotions through a lengthy and complex process that combines the recycling and regenerating of media in what could be described as a digital moving collage. The work is part of a broader investigation, which I began when I created two pieces presented at NYCAMS (New York Center for Art & Media Studies) for John Cage’s centennial in 2012 (a video installation/performance and a mix-media mural). This marked a departure in my practice and approach to photography, which I would describe as a shift from “taking pictures” to “making images”. This evolution in my work came from the inevitable confrontation with digital technologies, the frustration resulting from it and also the renewed possibilities it offers to go beyond the boundaries of the medium and to explore and combine different disciplines (video, photography, performance, painting). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52f41d0ae4b0096dbeac3653/1462033406005-H51QNYHATH54HBSOITPS/Heterotopia-54.jpg Projects http://www.karinelavalstudio.com/resume daily 0.75 2026-01-07 http://www.karinelavalstudio.com/about daily 0.75 2026-01-07 http://www.karinelavalstudio.com/press daily 0.75 2016-08-04