Kaari Upson

Drawing has always been a way for artists to better understand themselves and the world. There is a meditative quality attached to it and when the pencil touches the paper it can strengthens one’s grip on the world. Kaari Upson calls this ‘self mastery’ – and sometimes ‘self misery’. Apparently not much separates the two.  In Upson’s work, drawings are like evaluations of her projects, of her sculptures, her video works and her art performances. They are the echoes of her disturbed dreams; like ghosts from the past. Sometimes Upson mixes charcoal with aqua-resin, creating a black hole into which everything disappears. Concealing and revealing by turns, the two complement each other. She produces meticulous drawings, a combination of images from the archive she keeps, newspaper cuttings, magazines and photos she has found. Upson enjoys the formal tension between dry and wet – and its bodily innuendos.

For several years she focused on producing work for the Larry project, an investigation on the identity of the other that pushes and creates boundaries in defining how much, and in what way, you can know a person. In contrast to the dryness of pastel or charcoal dust, Upson’s latex sculptures seem to retain their wetness even after they have dried. The tone of pink that she chooses evokes not human skin but rather the uncanny, not-quite-flesh colour used for prosthetic limbs or sex dolls. In these sculptures, the artist casts architectural features; the hardness of this architecture succumbs to the same laws as the defeated human body, collapsing and folding in on itself.