Kaari Upson

Knots of language—funny, intimate, sordid, psychoanalytic—fill Kaari Upson’s drawings. This exhibition, “Body as Landscape,” features thirteen works on paper from the Los Angeles artist’s too-brief artistic career (she died in 2021, at age fifty-one). Operating as mind maps, script-like brainstorms, sculptural plans, and stand-alone objects, they chart Upson’s obsessions. The artist drew constantly, and in these pieces, Freudian lingo (“psychic mimesis”) is combined with other types of verbiage both violent (“you fucking pig”) and plaintive (“I will be lonely don’t do this.”) In Untitled (Hysterical Blindness), 2017, among copious notes about conversion disorder, she poses a question to herself: “Too many words / How to random edit? Pick a word, repeated. A repressed word that pushes out over and over as a starting point.”

The artist’s largest-ever drawing, Untitled, 2015–21, spanning seventeen-and-a-half feet in length, merges charged texts with partial sketches for various works, like her cast-furniture sculptures. Several smaller, earlier drawings hearken back to “The Larry Project,” 2005–12. For this epic, multimedia series, Upson mined stolen artifacts from the abandoned house of her parents’ neighbor in San Bernardino, California. The pseudonymous “Larry,” an unabashed creep who visited the Playboy mansion and went to prison, became Upson’s muse, inspiring hate, sympathy, and erotic fascination in equal measure. In Mutual Pathology, 2012, she outlines the titular phrase in white against a miasma of graphite, with the words “BABY PLEASE” shadowing it in the background. At the center of the picture is a rendering of a stepped form, resembling a detail from Upson’s Mirrored Staircase Inversion (San Bernardino), 2011—a replica of a double stairwell created on the site of Larry’s former home, created after it burned down. In Hateful Admiration, 2012, the words “Concern / Neglect” frame two pornographic drawings of female bodies. Throughout the series, Upson dually inhabited the roles of the hypersexual blonde bombshell (desired) and the voracious spectator (desiring).

Equally knotty is Upson’s sculpture eleven, 2020, an uncanny forest of limbs that divides the gallery in half. Hung from the ceiling like hunks of drying meat are eleven urethane objects bearing the forms of termite-ridden trees gnarled with veinlike scars, featuring enlarged casts of the artist’s knee. Their colors vary: from sunrise pinks and yellows to dark bruised-up blues. The scale of the works emulates a child’s perspective on seeing their mother’s legs—perhaps illustrating a moment of youthful psychosexual awareness and parental vulnerability.