Quarantine #8

Under the constraints of lockdown, Laval produced a series of images - Quarantine (an extension of the Heterotopia series) - that were all created in the garden of her home in Brooklyn.

The works were then exhibited as an outdoor installation in her garden entitled 'The Great Escape'. Reviewing the piece for ArtForum, Barry Schwabsky wrote…’the humble architecture of an urban garden, the vicissitudes of weather, the sky’s changing light, and the richness of the still photographic image turned out to be sufficient means for her to construct a gorgeous and sometimes slightly eerie playground for perception'.

That she titled the presentation 'The Great Escape' offered a delicious irony: at a time when even walking out of the house might have seemed fraught with peril, she made an ecstatic getaway to her own backyard.