Rachel Marisa LaBine’s (b.1987) painting practice is rooted in place: the way light can change a space, make the opaque seem permeable, transform the figure-ground relationship into something that has a sound. Eschewing abstraction and firmly grounded in the emotional resonance of her environment, LaBine’s work is guided by intuitions, synchronicities, and childhood memories that become sublimated into her painterly application of light. The sun setting on her as a child seated on a snowy ground in North Dakota, the sequins on her cousin’s ballet dress shifting under stage lights, an ember fading into darkness on a midnight run, or the sheen of carousel bulbs passing overhead at Chapultepec Park become notes in a visual register. Each lyrical composition slips between the flat image and the immersive world, casting the fragments of memory, place, and experience in an idiosyncratic glow.

LaBine received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI (2010), and subsequently received her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, School of the Arts in New York, NY (2019). Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at 12.26, Dallas, TX (2024); Et al., San Francisco, CA (2024); Bibeau Krueger, New York, NY (2022); and Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR (2019). She was the recipient of the FST StudioProjects Fund Grant (2023); The Puffin Foundation Grant (2023); and Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2019). LaBine currently lives and works in Queens, NY.

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