CHRIS LARSON
Terra Cotta, 2020
found industrial garment thread 48 x 37 x 3.25 in 21.9 x 94 x 8.3 cm |
Chris Larson is a multimedia artist that lives and works in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He integrates actions of sculpture, video, photography and drawing to respond to specific architectural spaces, sites, and their histories. Using relocation, replication, and repetition, he questions the inextricable relationships between body, machine, labor, and home. He disassembles the idea of the permanence of architecture, and introduces a new concept of fluid architecture that he uses to analyze the illusion of stability and draw attention to and challenge the unintended consequences of progress. He acknowledges that the conversations of the everyday hold vast potential for the examination of socio-historical complexities and the transcendental realities of object and body. Through gathering, archiving and restoration as a means of transformation, Larson’s work continues to evoke actions of reverence and renewal.
Larson is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota. Since receiving his MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1991, Larson has received numerous awards including a New Work Project Grant from The Harpo Foundation, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and most recently a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. Larson has had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, The View Contemporary Art Space in Switzerland, and his work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In 2018, Larson’s work was included in the 11th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and a solo 10-year survey exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, OH. Upcoming exhibitions include Saudi Arabia (2021), Berlin (2021), and Chicago (2022). In 2019, he co-founded Second Shift Studio Space of St. Paul, a nonprofit residency program and gallery serving artists/makers/thinkers who are marginalized as a result of their gender identity. |
