A multimedia exhibition about the act of seeing and the choices we make about what deserves our attention. Through acrylic, charcoal, textile, video, audio, installation, and interactive works, it asks the viewer to notice the moment before conscious perception: the instinct to stare, avert the eyes, move closer, or leave.

Study in Five, Redux begins with disability. A visibly disabled body is looked at constantly and seen rarely.

Five pairs of eyes, painted on canvas and cut free, then for a time mounted together on raw burlap, the way a Southern quilt gathers scraps. The burlap held them like a net. Four belong to people who looked at me rather than stared. None of them knew one another, and each has known incarceration closely. The fifth is a composite, drawn from the children who have looked at me with open curiosity.

In each pair, one eye is left unfinished and open to revision. No one is seen all at once, and no one is seen the same way twice.

This is the half of the work about being seen. The other half will be about being stared at.

In 2020 the State of Alabama executed my client, Nathaniel Woods. After that I began painting the people I came to know through my work in Alabama’s prisons, including men on death row.

The state reduces each of them to an inmate number and a case file. I wanted to paint the person instead.

Faraino presents a multimedia exhibition about the act of seeing and the choices we make about what deserves our attention.

Through acrylic, charcoal, textile, video, audio, installation, and interactive works, the exhibition invites and challenges the viewer to notice the moment before conscious perception: the instinct to stare, avert the eyes, move closer, or leave.

Moving between beauty and discomfort, intimacy and spectacle, grief and joy, Faraino is particularly interested in states of being that are often flattened by social convention lest they disturb order: disability, criminality, death, and sexuality. Rather than asking the viewer to replace one prescribed response with another, the exhibition asks them to remain with what they see long enough for their first interpretation to become unstable.

A proposal for the exhibition is available on request. Studio visits on the Lower East Side by appointment.

Lauren Faraino is a Southern artist and attorney from Birmingham, Alabama, now based on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She was born with arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, a condition that limits the use of her arms and legs, and has been making art since she was two, painting mostly with her feet. As a child, she showed work at the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Before returning to New York, Faraino spent nearly a decade as a civil rights lawyer and investigator in Alabama, much of it inside the state’s prison system. She was part of the small team behind the undercover prison investigation in The Alabama Solution, nominated for the 2026 Academy Award for Best Documentary, and her legal work appears in the Emmy-nominated New York Times Presents: To Live and Die in Alabama. In 2024 she was named a Soros Justice Fellow for her investigation into the retention of organs from people who died in state custody.

Her work deals with how people look at one another: the urge to stare at a disabled body or look away from someone in prison, and the rarer experience of being looked at with care. Much of it comes from the South: its quilts and plain materials, and the resilience it has built out of pain. She is developing her first solo exhibition.