“It’s wonderful how little a tree will look within the forest, and the way insanely massive and deformed it appears to be like in your home,” Kaari Upson muses in her video Masquerade (2019). This units the tone for a mixture of works at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles—all responses to a dollhouse constructed for the artist’s collaborator, Kris, by Kris’s mom—that comprise a poignant reflection on the fabrication of tales and objects and the vicissitudes of scale. Within the video, Upson is garishly made up: trompe l’oeil open eyes are painted on her closed lids, and she or he wears a black wig as she blindly describes a home setting populated with hats and hairpieces. In one other video, Alex’s Home (2019), Upson seems with Kris in comparable make-up; each put on wigs to resemble the opposite. Collectively, they stumble via a sparse set, sometimes embracing, whereas Upson drags round her sculptures, together with an enlarged solid model of a miniature wrapped present from the unique dollhouse. Some sculptures have spray-painted finishes that stain their clear white clothes. The 2 buddies appear to enact an imaginary scene because the life-size inhabitants of an in any other case empty kids’s dollhouse, managed by some unseen drive.
These two quick movies, looped with one different referred to as Clit Knowledge (2019), play on a monitor on the reverse aspect of a fireplace that Upson solid in urethane from the modern hearth in Kris’s Las Vegas residence; its damaging area holds a pile of solid desk legs. The uncanny spillage of limb-like types recollects the sculpture of Robert Gober, whereas the reproduction of a childhood area conjures the work of Mike Kelley. Close by sits a settee from the set in Alex’s Home; 3D-milled from wooden, it was then layered with spray paint for a purple patina. A paper model of this similar couch was as soon as a part of Kris’s dollhouse. Elsewhere within the gallery are a urethane solid of a plastic-wrapped Christmas tree and two cumbersome types resembling the casts of wrapped presents within the video, one upright and the opposite on its aspect. These components all appear at residence within the phantasm of the enlarged dollhouse; much less anticipated are the enormous 3D-printed clit rings sitting on the couch and piercing the wrapped Christmas tree. The clit rings relate to a narrative Kris tells in Clit Knowledge, whereas sitting in a rocking chair, about getting a clit piercing that will have disgusted an ex. With or with out that clarification, Upson unsettles, combining the traditional area of childhood fantasy with a darker, extra mysterious, and sexualized imaginative and prescient of home life. The narratives in her movies quantity to a unfastened memoir, the place Upson and Kris mirror on encounters and choices which may be their very own or invented for his or her characters, as a baby may for a doll. Upson’s voice is doubled in an eerie echo.
Other than psychological disturbance, the artist achieves materials intrigue via the moiré patterning of her objects, ensuing from her spray-painting and digital printing processes. She additionally creates rigidity by substituting one materials for an additional: the sofa appears to be like delicate however is tough, and the desk legs must be inflexible however seem considerably flaccid. Upson’s earlier work with pillows and sectionals established a foundation for this exploration; in Aqua-Contemporary (2014–16), for instance, she solid a used mattress, including coloration to evoke stains. In the meantime, the movies reinforce discrepancies in scale, partly as a result of they’re nested within the hearth fragment but in addition as a result of they function components of the set up itself as set items. Elsewhere within the exhibition are drawings and work that equally take care of scale and domesticity, such because the artist’s big untitled graphite drawings; the calmly scrawled and closely bolded phrases in these works experiment with language as a posh device for private expression: self seeding, pleasure / preoccupation with waste, over identification with incongruous fantasy. Taken as an entire, the exhibition—the primary solo presentation of the artist’s work in her residence metropolis since her premature demise final yr—reinforces Upson’s significance as a strong and transferring storyteller.