Diane Lavoie is a North American visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. She holds an MFA in painting from California State University Long Beach and a BFA in illustration from Massachusetts College of Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in private and public collections in the US and Europe.

Diane Lavoie‘s art is a dialogue between the natural and the artificial, and explores the boundaries between reality and perception. With her, Reforestation series, Lavoie uses large-scale, textile representations of natural environments to create a contrast and a connection with the actual nature where she hangs them. Lavoie then photographs the result, capturing the interplay of light, shadow, color and texture. The photo is the final manifestation of the work, a visual record of her intervention and interaction with nature.

With her, Miniature Detritus series, Lavoie makes miniature landscapes from household textiles and found materials. Working in this small-scale, 12 x 8 centimeters, allows her a reprieve from the commitment her large-scale installations require. Despite requiring much less time and materials (or perhaps because they require less time and materials), these works enable her to depict a vast view within their diminutive size, and invite the viewer to look closely.

Fabric forest addresses how the complex interactions of our selves with our environment are constantly predicted to change. Yet, while change is inevitable, these predictions rarely match what- in retrospect- is identified as the major development. The forest here is used as a stand-in: A primordial environment, nurturing, menacing, a classic topic of environmentalism, etc. However, the piece is not intended to contemplate conservation but rather asks: In the future, what will have been being considered as a natural environment and how wrong will all the predictions be? The work illustrates one conceivable such scenario in which predictions were correct for an artificial environment but wrong in the sense that it turned out to be analog rather than virtual. -  for 48 Stunden Neukölln, 2019

info@dianelavoie.com