Rachel Marisa LaBine
A gravity, a grave, a game

November 1 - December 21, 2024

Presented in collaboration with Bibeau Krueger

Lintel

There is a long corridor lined with cobblestones. An ancient threshold marks the spot where the passage would have opened into a maze of smaller rooms. Tonight, the maze is still in place, but it is difficult to say the same for the rooms –there is only open sky above, and the ceilings are nowhere in sight.

A chorus of eerie screeches has taken the place of the invisible doors. Above our heads, underneath the lintel the smallest of openings reveals itself. This gap, oblivious to any sense of gravity, has turned into a gate. The sound begins within and escapes through this narrow fissure. As it reaches us, the echoes uncover the fact that, at odds with its flatness, this wall actually encases a cavern.

Let us consider bats. Although appealing, they do not just sleep all day and come out to work by night. They can turn an otherwise solid wall into a vast vessel, inside which there is no up or down, but a tide. Let us imagine a camp of them without passing unto it our first names or our knowledgeable categories. If we can do this, bats stop being night creatures.

What if we reshuffle some data, and allow ourselves to picture how when bats cuddle up together, breath becomes a collective unison? Skin allows them to see far beyond the dark nearness. A commune turns into a slow moving cloud where imagination is a warm shapelessness. A multitude of bats becomes a bark encasing a sprawling sense of time, encompassing many lifetimes, past and future. Hanging there, yes, inside and upside down, there is no use for gravity, only an unbounded fluttering ocean.

Resemblances of individual dreams only begin when the bats all rush through the gap, like a fountain, the stream stretches, the reach of the screeches echoing until silence. Each wing flows to glean unfixed places and pieces of the shadowy beyonds, new dreams to bring back and sustain the fog. Blind as a bat… are you sure about that? 

For a few years, this city had no gate to the open sea. The fog would provide the narrow passageway with a cover and hide it from the passing ships. One day, a lucky Juan managed to find Alcatraz. Only then the fog lifted, maps changed and menacing cliffs, the edge, turned into a gate. The fire, the bridge and Hitchcock came later.  

I have been to San Francisco before, but by now so many of the hearts that made it for me a semblance of a place to belong to, have already left, some are even dead. Recently I have seen post cards of the city sheltered by many bucolic sunsets. What kind of atmospheres lie behind the curtains and the miniature doors that freckle the skin of these pictures? For how long will those undercurrents be confined to the cardboard print before returning to dust?

Far from being a barren substance, the desert is a domain of utmost subtleness where nothing unnecessary is granted a space. Oases and mirages are no exceptions, they are utterances of the stubborn source where the possible always is, despite all factual complications. The barren land, the scorching surface, become springs that seek to erode all illusions of ossified rule. Let us contemplate and remember how to conjure and shear off the violent excess and saturation of idols and golden calves.

Back at the lintel, every night in the wake of the winged dream, resident ghosts usher the bats to come back home.

—Ricardo Alzati

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Rachel Marisa LaBine is a visual artist living in New York City. She was born on a new moon in January of 1987 in Grand Forks, North Dakota. When she was 10 years old, the river she lived next to flooded the entire town. That event taught her a lot about painting. Rachel completed a MFA at Columbia University in 2019, and a BFA at RISD in 2010. She received the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award in 2019.

In 2024, she will have solo exhibitions at Et al (San Francisco) and Gallery 12.26 (Dallas). Her previous solo projects have taken place at Bibeau Krueger (NYC), Fourteen30 Contemporary (Portland, OR), and Material Fair (Mexico City) presented by Bibeau Krueger. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Naranjo141 (Mexico City), False Flag (NYC), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), and a three-person show at Lyles & King (NYC). Her work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, and mentioned in Artforum and Artnet.