Exhibition Review: Karine Laval: Trembling Giant
Karine Laval, Pando #7, 2018, archival pigment print, Image courtesy of the artist and SOCO Gallery
By Megan May Walsh
Copy Edited By Parker Renick
Artist Karine Laval’s solo exhibition Trembling Giant with SOCO Gallery imagines a color-soaked otherworldly ecosystem that conjures a deep awe for the unknown of the wild and inspires an untamed wanderlust for the mysteries and allures of nature. Laval’s work explores our relationship to the mysticism of planet earth with our compulsion to imagine fantastical worlds to account for everyday magic. Her pigment prints explore the limits of 20th-century avant-garde and surrealism alongside the possibilities of other mediums such as painting, moving images, and performance. The resulting imagery created in-camera as single frames using reflective surfaces, both natural and artificial light, and distorted perspectives is a portal from the world we live in into a bright pink, royal blue, and teal green dreamscape of a surreal and magnificently disorientating natural world.
Karine Laval, Pando #23, 2018, archival pigment print, Image courtesy of the artist and SOCO Gallery
The Trembling Giant captures a dreamlike dimension of Pando, an ancient forest located in Fishlake National Forest in Utah connected by one intertwined root system. It is believed to be the largest and most dense organism ever found, estimated to have started at the end of the last ice age. Pando spreads over 106 acres with over 40,000 individual trees. When the wind wanders through the ancient forest, rustling the leaves of the thousands and thousands of trees, an ethereal sound hums, creating the Trembling Giant. Laval mystifies the wild. She captures a visual representation of the movement of wind rustling the leaves in an ancient forest through a mixture of stills and videos that collapse place and time to create a dreamscape that casts planet earth into another world entirely. Wildly vibrant colors and unearthly tones mark this new world as one where the magic and wonder of nature are the fabric of existence and experience. All walks of earth are spellbound by the Trembling Giant, destined to bow down to its ethereal grace and untamed beauty. It is a color-soaked dreamscape ruled by larger than life presence, its roots breathing life into all its wandering spirits.
Karine Laval, Pando #11, 2018, archival pigment print, Image courtesy of the artist and SOCO Gallery
This is the wanderlust dreamlike reality Karine Laval conjures with her photographic collection Trembling Giant. Exhibitions like this allow viewers to not only step through a portal into an otherworldly dimension; it evokes a pondering on the power and magic of nature in this world of our own. Drawing upon tendrils of memory and whispers of narratives inspired by witnessing corners of the natural worlds, Karine Laval spins a bridge into existence between the natural and supernatural. Casting the wonders of wild ecosystems as magical, Laval reveals the magic hidden in our world in the whispers of leaves rustling and the breadth of biodiversity.
Karine Laval, Pando #16, 2018, archival pigment print, Image courtesy of the artist and SOCO Gallery
Solo exhibition Trembling Giant at SOCO by artist Karine Laval was on view from April 27th to June 8th, 2022. This is Laval’s second solo exhibition at SOCO Gallery, a contemporary art space and bookshop in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a new project space in New York City. For more information on the exhibition and Karine Laval, visit the gallery’s website https://socogallery.com/karine-laval-trembling-giant-press-release?mc_cid=122e8304a6&mc_eid=5859d27157
