Informed by her critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kaari Upson plumbs her biography to examine points of psychological trauma, which often relate to her own (and others’) disappointment at the impossibility of attaining certain culturally prescribed ideals. This disappointment is materially manifested in her sculptures, drawings and performances as a loss of information that occurs when one object or idea is translated into another state – cast, for instance, or rendered pictorially. Kaari Upson first became known for The Larry Project (2007-2012), an ambitious series of works through which she explored the identity of a man whom she had never met – a neighbour of her parents. The artworks that emerged from her quasi-obsessive investigation into “Larry” included large-scale installations, paintings, drawings, and video performances in which Upson inhabited the kinds of sexualised female archetypes that Larry objectified.
