Silver Tongue
March 24 - May 8th, 2022
P.Bibeau is pleased to present Silver Tongue, an exhibition of new work by Rachel Marisa LaBine on view from March 24 until May 8th, 2022.
Rachel Marisa LaBine's paintings actualize an almost discernible space. Hovering in and collapsing the distance between physical object and composition, they draw equivalencies to the transience of constructed human desire in an image-laden world. Employing replication of familiar cultural and architectural elements as anchors, LaBine allows fragments of the original composition to dissipate and ultimately merge with the plasticity of line, color and symbolism.
The slippage between two-dimensional composition and physical scale emphasizes the viewer’s physicality within time, and points to flatness as an increasingly pervasive societal condition. The paintings are caught in current time as they concern binary thinking, propaganda, cultural artifact, and structures that maintain order and the aftereffect of each, dualistically. Calling attention to the virtual simulation of life constructed through a screen, the compositions are motionless and attempt to conjure personal memory, unseen spaces, and the tension of static representation contemporaneously. An oscillating hierarchy between figure and ground implies a meditative device to elicit a sense of curious dislocation for the viewer, distilling attentional agency from pictorial ambiguity.
In Headless, LaBine builds and dissolves a symmetry through visual indicators including neoclassical architecture, collateral from advertising campaigns, and elements from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, using stylized romanticism to draw a parallel between the consolidation of power and the manufacturing of individual desire. In real terms, this allows the painting to lose its reliant order to shadow, solidary objects, endless passageways, vast space or archways, and collide with abstraction.
In an attempt to further engage the physical space and the compositional surface, Ravine manipulates polyester chiffon into a cascading, translucent plane, evoking geological formation, weather, and an ominously oversized gown. The addition of paint onto the substrate, while allowing for visibility of its original construction, further complicates the new reality of the object: it’s equally familiar and new, unresolved yet convincing in permanence. Similarly, Highway monocle applies the language of light reflecting off of a spherical, mirrored surface. The tiny size of the painting is at odds with its large-feeling composition and visual hints of a planetary scale. The result is a flattened construction that both reveals and removes the objective space in the picture plane.
Considering mediation of images and their value in unspoken cultural adherence, Mr. Pyrite posits the seen and unseen features of a construct: a cartoon still from the 1930s and the labyrinth underscore of what was being projected through the medium. Here an entangling of the two is presented by a twisting of the archaic technology of cel animation, during a time when a screen was synonymous with entertainment yet possessed far sinister agendas. Today’s fusion of the attention economy and the entertainment industry demand a similar blurring of the lines between real and virtual, truth and post-truth, fakes and deepfake. In this spirit LaBine’s paintings provoke nested formal and social paradoxes, suggesting the further the polarity, the closer they become.
Rachel Marisa LaBine lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Columbia University, New York (2019) and her BFA from RISD (2010). LaBine’s work has been included in several group exhibitions including False Flag, New York (2021), Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2019), Lyles & King, New York (2017), Ms Barbers, Los Angeles (2017) and previously had a solo exhibition at Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR (2019). In 2019 LaBine received the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award.
Rachel Marisa LaBine
Highway monocle, 2022
oil on panel
6 x 8 inches (15.24 x 20.32 cm)
unique
Rachel Marisa LaBine
Gossamer cell, 2022
oil on panel
8 x 10 inches (20.32 x 25.4 cm)
unique
Rachel Marisa LaBine
Mr. Pyrite, 2022
acrylic and oil on canvas
20 x 25 inches (50.8 x 63.5 cm)
unique
Rachel Marisa LaBine
Headless, 2022
acrylic and oil on canvas
47 x 40 inches (119.38 x 101.6 cm)
unique
Rachel Marisa LaBine
Ravine, 2022
Acrylic, polyester chiffon, canvas, aluminum, collage
115 x 58 x 12 inches (292.1 x 147.32 x 30.48 cm)
unique
