Building a bridge between the heavenly and the mundane.
Lani Trock (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers in harmonious world-building. To awaken the collective imagination and actualize a new operating system for society, she works with organic sculptural materials to cultivate gentle environments, and invites visitors to contemplate from their unique voice and vision, how they would imagine the world at peace. Engaging with art as a spiritual practice, honoring the studio & gallery as spaces of devotion, she builds ephemeral altars and invites collaborators to activate them in joyful co-creation. In communion with her site-specific, immersive installations, she facilitates group expressions of improvisational sound and movement techniques. Through these public programs, she invites participants to co-create the new earth – an alternative cultural paradigm that seeks to shift away from a capitalist logic of scarcity, commodification, and competition, towards equitable abundance, collaboration, and mutual benefit. This way of seeing is grounded in the understanding that everything is alive, has spirit, and that together, we all coexist as an interconnected, symbiotic organism. Bridging physical and virtual modalities, her participatory artworks integrate the biomimetic intelligence of natural ecosystems with the collectivist principles underlying open-source software to imagine a symbiotic society, rooted in an ethos of care.
Trock was born and raised in Hawai’i, and has a BA in Philosophy from UC Santa Cruz. In recent years, she has presented work with The Armory Center for the Arts, UNFOLD with ICASD, OCHI, LA Nomadic Division, Praz-Delavallade, Jeffery Deitch with Nicodim, and the LA Municipal Art Gallery. She has been published in Autre Magazine, Murder Magazine and Plant Magick from The Library of Esoterica, Vol 4. In 2021, her solo exhibition, and so we blossom gently into the infinite garden, was presented at Hansell Gallery during a year-long residency at The Philosophical Research Society, while she concurrently participated in Kernel, a virtual fellowship to explore the intersection of web3 & public goods. She is a longtime resident of Los Angeles and an active participant in its interwoven art & music communities.
