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Laine Justice

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ARTIST STATEMENT

I am an intuitive maker with an interdisciplinary practice, working in painting, textiles, bookmaking, and more.


I explore feelings of place, autonomy, identity, and play. Using layered markmaking, I weave together hybrid creatures in states of shifting identity and form, into sculpted and emotive, abstracted landscapes.


Working with materials of contrasting sheen and texture creates image within image along with conflicting visual planes that bounce animals back and forth between figuration, landscape, or abstraction. I am in love with painting materials, making use of almost everything. Handmade paint with speciality pigments, tube paint impasto, drawing, and spectral materials like mini glass mosaic or interference pigments that shift colors with light, thread through all my work.


Giant puzzles, these places are spaces I have been, or want to stand before to play while continually finding something new. Pareidolia is the concept we are all so familiar with: staring up at the sky, searching, and finding a familiar shape or two in the clouds. Even though it’s autonomous we often ask someone, do you see that too? There is something magical about imagining spaces that are only for you, escaping the something real right before you, the freedom to change your mind at any time, or to share your world with others, knowing we just may or may not ever see the same thing.


My work explores these these imaginative, elusive spaces and their intersection with our sense of place and self. The spirit of the wild, natural world that envelops us, with our more human, emotional worlds, and the internal places this meeting creates within each of us. These spaces began for me as a refuge from childhood trauma and disability when I was young, and continue to describe the world I experience now and times I have been that have no words.


Curiosity and play provide endless possibilities as we relate to ourselves and each other. My favorite question is “what do you see?”

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Birmingham AL in 1981, Laine grew up in the Pacific Northwest, spending summers in the South garnering a lifelong appreciation of making from her grandmother, a quilter, dollmaker, and ceramicist. This love of creating grew into formal life study at the Portland Art Museum and imaginative drawing, practices cut short in her early teens.

Taken at 14 in the middle of the night to North Idaho, Laine spent her formative years in CEDU’s system of group homes and wilderness programs. CEDU, from the cult Synanon, practiced pseudopsychology, around-the-clock thought reform, and behavior modification on children. Restricting access to the world, education, and bodily autonomy, this inhumane environment reframed life into black & white morality and ritualistic behaviors in an incredibly isolated place. Learning to shift who one is and their understanding of the world as a means of survival, left many with out a stable individual identity. Exploring this sense of one’s shifting self in within a moving world continues to thread through all of her work. Despite harsh conditions inherent to the program and the Idaho wilderness, time in the natural world provided Laine an immediate respite and sense of wonder. Wild open spaces, how we feel in them, and our connection to the creatures that move through them, remains a lasting influence on her work.

Laine left CEDU in the winter, a few months before her 18th birthday and immediately enrolled in university, thrilled with the opportunity to learn and pursue drawing. She began foundation and life study at Pacific Northwest College of Art, before moving to NY and to begin studies at Pratt Institute. Life study and landscape are still very much a part of her contemporary studio practice. Laine earned her BFA in painting from Pratt Institute in 2003, after spending 2 years studying sculpture and one semester in Lucca, Italy, on a Gilman travel and study grant learning about pigments and the sculptural qualities of paint.

A SF Bay Area Artadia Award Finalist, Community Foundation Sonoma Emerging Artist Awardee, and a recipient of a Chalk Hill Residency Scholarship, she has had her work exhibited at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, the Sonoma County Museum of Art, and more broadly throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Santa Fe, and Costa Rica. Her work has appeared in Luxe Magazine, House Beautiful, Sonoma Magazine, San Francisco Magazine, and The History Channel among other publications. Active within the #unsilenced and #breakincodesilence movements, her advocacy work has focused on raising awareness about institutional child abuse within congregate care. Working within disability — CPTSD, Lupus, and ME — shapes her studio practice. She works in Northern California with her husband and their pug, Bernie.

The SICAA ACT & #BreakingCodeSilence Movement
An advocate for survivors of the “Troubled” Teen / Teen Treatment Industry (TTI) and Institutional Child Abuse, it’s my hope to see an end to the TTI and equal rights for children in congregate care. I put “Troubled” in quote marks because more often than not, the youth sent into the TTI are far from troubled. They are kids that are disabled and in need of extra care, foster kids with no placement,  children with depression  in need of extra support such as time in therapy and extra attention with their care givers, or LGBTQ2+ children sent away for conversion- and once in the TTI they find nothing but abuse.
Inspired by the courage of fellow survivors in the #BreakingCodeSilence and #ISeeYouSurvivor movements, I recently shared my testimonial [trigger warning: child abuse, mental health] with #IGotOut.org, speaking about my time at CEDU Rocky Mountain Academy, Ascent and the process of being transported from state to state by strangers. I lived in shame, silence and fear about what happened to me for many years. I believe it is important to speak out loud about what happens in these facilities so that desperate parents first try to seek community care, and if residential care is truly the last option, they know what to look for and what to avoid. Secondly, so that our representatives know that they need to do better for our children. There is so much that needs to be fixed.
Despite how hard it is to recount what happened in these facilities, thousands of survivors have bravely come forward to share their experiences in support of the The Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act (SICAA), to support the bill, click on this link. To read more testimonials, and to learn about the survivor led movement seeking the exposure of injustice and legislative reform, please visit Unsilenced.org.

#Unsilenced #ISeeYouSurvivor #UnitedWithOneVoice #KidsOverProfit #LetsTalkAboutIt #ThinkOfUs #IGotOut

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Justice-All the Animals, 24 x 38" Cedar Frame

CURRICULUM VITAE

LAINE JUSTICE
N. Sonoma County, California

 

EDUCATION
2003.

Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, BFA, Painting
Pratt Institute, Lucca, Italy, Painting

 

1998
Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR, Life Study

S

ELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2023
Pink Skies, Bannister Wines, Geyserville, CA
2022 
Skyscapes, Fouladi Projects, San Francisco, CA
Selected Murmurations: Twirling Birds and Wild Creatures, Gallery Lulo, Healdsburg, CA
2020
Giants Still, Gallery Lulo, Healdsburg, CA
2018
AnimalAnimalAnimal!, Gallery Lulo, Healdsburg, CA
2017
Paintings, 555 California, San Francisco, CA
2016
Unraveling Alexander’s Band, Gallery Lulo, Healdsburg, CA
Mr Fox, Studio Ecesis, Healdsburg, CA
2015
At Mount Meru, Fouladi Projects, San Francisco, CA
The Battle of Mara, The Slaughterhouse, Healdsburg, CA
2014
Mise-en-scènes, Jeff Alan Gard Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Into the Forest, Studio Blomster, Guerneville, CA
2013
Out Come the Divs!, Perdita Productions, Geyserville, CA
2011
Worldscapes in Oil, Sonoma Academy, Santa Rosa, CA
2010
New Work, Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2023
Can’t Wait for Tomorrow, Wave Collective, San Francisco, CA
2020
Some Speechless Thing, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA
Annual Artist Exhibition, print collaboration, Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA
2019
SUBJECT-OBJECT, Roving Venue, Healdsburg, CA
à la prochaine, Jules Maeght Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2017
Pairings, Sonoma Valley Museum, Sonoma, CA
Not Alone: Exquisite Corpse of the Unknown Veteran, drawing collaboration, SFAC, San Francisco, CA
2016
Into the Woods, Jules Maeght Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Sunny, Fouladi Projects, San Francisco, CA
2015
Here!, Berkeley Arts Center, Berkeley, CA
2014
200 Show, Kitty Hawk Gallery, Sebastopol, CA
2011
Laine Justice, Tramaine De Senna, and Andrew Sofie, Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, CA
2006
Wish, Hang Art, San Francisco, CA
9 years, 9 Artists, Hang Art, San Francisco, CA
2003
Summer Invitational, Rubelle and Norman Shaffler Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

HONORS AND AWARDS
2022
Artadia Bay Area Award Finalist
2017
Chalk Hill Artist Residency fellowship
2010
Emerging Visual Artist Award Grant, Community Foundation Sonoma
2001
Gilman Travel and Study Grant for Art and Design
2000
Buckley Endowed Grant for Scholastic Achievement

PRESS
2022
SF Chronicle, “3 Bay Area Visual Artists Win 2022 Artadia Awards” Joshua Kosman
Artadia, San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award Finalists Announced
Luxe Magazine, “Art Therapy: Northern California Artist Finds Beauty and Solace in Painting the Natural
World” Deborah Bishop
IGotOut.org, April, “Untitled: It feels like there are 5 of Me” Laine Justice
2021
House Beautiful, Dec / Jan, ”This Sonoma Home is Swathed in Warm Woods and Sunlight" 
2020
”Reflections: Laine Justice Q&A with Gallery Lulo” Gallery Lulo and Alice Sutro
Little Big Ears: Time Stands Still & The Air Turns to Mountains, Illuminated manuscript
elephant folio, Laine Justice
2018
Luxe Magazine, May, ”Catalina Marin Brings Luxury to Her Designs”
Hyperallergic, February, ”Peace and Grief in the Art of US Veterans”
2016
SF Chronicle, January, ”Artists call upon nature for ‘Into the Woods”
SF Chronicle, July, ”Healdsburg Hip and Hot”
Unraveling Alexander’s Band, animation, Perdita Productions and Laine Justice
2015
San Francisco Magazine, October, ”Not Your Middle School Haunted House”
Hoodline.com “Jules Maeght Gallery Goes ‘Into the Woods’”
SFAI Alumni Spotlight “Holly Fouladi”
2013
#foryouilovemore, animation, Perdita Productions and Laine Justice
2011
Petals and Bones Zine, “Magical Mistress of Visual Whimsy” Dani Burlison
2010
The Bohemian, January, “Emerging Visions” Dani Burlison

LECTURES
2011
Visiting Artist, AICAD's NY Studio DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY
Visiting Artist Panel, Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, CA
Visiting Artist Lecture, Sonoma Academy, Santa Rosa, CA

COMMUNITY
2023
Spectrum Gala and Art Auction, Pier 27, Access Institute, San Francisco, CA
39th Annual Art for the Heart Benefit Auction, Sonoma State University Gallery, Rohnert Park, CA
2022
38th Annual Art for the Heart Benefit Auction, Sonoma State University Gallery, Rohnert Park, CA
2021
37th Annual Art for the Heart Benefit Auction, Sonoma State University Gallery, Rohnert Park, CA
2010
1st Annual Benefit, Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth, The Yale Club, NY, NY
2008
Pins of Marin, Big Brothers and Sisters of the North Bay, San Rafael, CA
2007
Painted Trucks on Parade, Healdsburg Boys and Girls Club, Healdsburg, CA

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