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ArchiveBorn 1966 in St. Paul, MN, USA
Chris Larson was born in 1966 in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he still lives and works. Since 2008, his video “County Line” is part of the surrealistic collection Scharf-Gerstenberg/New National Gallery/National Museums of Berlin. Moreover, in 2008, his film “Crush Collision”, purchased by the New National Gallery Berlin, was shown in the Art Basel section “Art Film”.
Chris Larson’s art examines the relationships between humans and machines, exploring these ideas in sculpture, photography, drawing, and film. His sculptures are large wooden constructions that “operate” in an ambiguous realm between heroic purpose and absurd repetition. They play the dignity of human work and invention against the futility of toil and mechanization. Some sculptures speak of irrational collisions, like that of a spaceship crashing into a barn; other sculptures are “machines” to which Larson returns in his films, documenting enigmatic collaborations among people who labor together toward an unknown purpose. In one film, Larson confronts tropes of good and evil, yet confounds us with the strange, primal results of the encounter. Richly metaphoric, Larson’s
work dissolves clear boundaries between human and machine, purpose and absurdity, and the possibility of spiritual transcendence versus mechanistic determinism.
 Chris Larson, Deep North, 5 C-prints mounted on aludibond, 90 x 90 cm / 35 x 35 inches, Edition of 5 + 2 AP’s, 2008. |
