Karine Laval’s latest project, Trembling Giant, focuses on Pando, a unique ecosystem located in Fishlake National Forest, Utah. 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.
Laval’s new body of work continues her ongoing exploration of our relationship to nature. Her images are composite landscapes of natural shapes and radical manipulation of light, which abstract 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. The distortions, superimpositions and otherworldly colours are created in camera as single frames using reflective surfaces, natural and artificial light, skewed perspectives and at times extreme crops.
Karine Laval is a French artist based in NY who 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. Last Summer, a major public art installation of her work was presented throughout the parks and gardens of the national museum of Château de Malmaison outside Paris.
