San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Artist created ‘Larry Project’
Kaari Upson, an American artist whose uncanny sculptures, videos, drawings and performances probed the dark sides of domesticity and desire, died Wednesday at a hospital in New York City. She was 51.
The cause was metastatic breast cancer, said Claire de Dobay Rifelj, a director at the Los Angeles arm of Sprüth Magers, the gallery that represents her.
Upson, one of the most significant artists to emerge from the vibrant Los Angeles art scene this century, won early attention for “The Larry Project,” an openended phantasmagoria based on the life of an unknown neighbor of her parents in San Bernardino, who had abandoned his McMansion. Working from photographs, legal documents, diaries and pornographic magazines left behind in the house, Upson spun an obsessive psychological profile, on the border between fact and fiction, of a stranger who had constructed a cutrate Playboy Mansion on a suburban cul-de-sac.
First shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2007, “The Larry Project” spiraled into a five-year series of large charcoal drawings, drippy painted portraits and performances with a life-size “Larry” mannequin. The project’s compulsive reflections of Californian fantasies and nightmares built on the abject Americana of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and other Los Angeles artists who emerged in the 1980s, as well as the intimate obsessions of French artist Sophie Calle.
“The Larry Project,” neurotic and tender by turns, evolved into a much more emotional, all-encompassing undertaking — in which the absent Larry, whom Upson never met, expanded into the artist’s muse, her lover, her persecutor and, ultimately, her doppelgänger. By the end, no clean distinction was left between artist and subject; the two had become doubles. One drawing in the Hammer Museum show bore the words, “I am more he than he is.”
The project ended in 2011 with a performance at a Los Angeles gallery at which she dragged a charcoal-and-wax mannequin of Larry on the walls and floor inside a plywood cube until the effigy disintegrated, symbolically turning Larry’s body into dust.
In about 2013, she turned to casting mattresses, couches and other domestic objects in latex, urethane or silicone.
The resin sculptures were featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2019 Venice Biennale, and Upson’s art is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and other major museums. Upson was born April 22, 1970, in San Bernardino, to Karin (Kuhlemann) Upson and Bert Upson. (Her year of birth has often been incorrectly reported as 1972.) The landscape of the Inland Empire, and the ecological perils of wildfires and mudslides, shaped her impressions of the single-family house as a fraught and unstable thing. Reflecting on her childhood in a 2017 issue of Interview magazine, she said, “I grew up in a constant state of something coming from the outside that you couldn’t control, and everything could be gone at any minute.”
She went east to study at the New York Studio School. She returned to complete her bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 2004 and her master’s in 2007 at the California Institute of the Arts.
She is survived by her daughter, Esmé Earl Rudell; her brother, Dirk Upson; and her father. Her marriage in 2000 to Kirk Rudell, a television producer, ended in divorce in 2010.