Ended
Peter LaBier
A Shot May Be Made
Apr 1 – May 14, 2022
STO LAT is pleased to present our inaugural show, A Shot May Be Made, an exhibition of new paintings by Peter LaBier.
LaBier’s process is intuitive and inquisitive—playfully asking how images become legible and stable. Depictions of crisis and conflict are the subject of this new body of work, executed under the Covid-19 lockdown. The paintings on view accumulate images of control, isolation, escalation, and hope—swelling musical crescendos, handcuffs, police officers, birds in flight and rebellious horses. These inherited symbols juxtapose and overwrite one another, competing for real estate and attention. Each painting is an ecosystem from which an image emerges via layers of play and experimentation.
The work’s grisaille palette forms a complicated relationship to the Modernist painting history of free associative and abstract narratives. Although LaBier’s process endorses chance, symbolism and subversion, his eye is also skeptical and democratic. Slyly, his work questions heroic proclamations of truth—both narrative and psychological—by placing their underlying visual language up for debate.
Peter LaBier (b. 1980) Washington, D.C., lives and works in New York. He received his B.A. from Vassar College in 2003 and his M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2017. LaBier is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, music and performance. In addition to his work as a visual artist, he is the founding member of the band Psychobuildings. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, and internationally in Berlin and Hamburg. Past performances include NADA Presents: Peter LaBier, Mirror Portraits at Skylight Clarkson Square, New York, NY; Performa 17: Brian Belott, People Pie Pool at Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY; In Response: Unorthodox at The Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include The Displaced Image at Ortega y Gasset Projects and All By Myself with Hesse Flatow, New York. A Shot May Be Made is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery, preceeded by Salon de Espera.