Kaari Upson

Upson was born in San Bernardino, California, on April 22, 1970.[1][7] However her date of birth is often listed as 1972, incorrectly.[1] She attended New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture and later attended California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).[1] She received her BFA in 2004 and her MFA in 2007 from CalArts.[1] She began The Larry Project as a student, and exhibited a portion of the work as her MFA thesis.[8][9]

She was married from 2000 until 2010 to television producer Kirk Rudell, together they had one child.[1]

In 2017, she had a large moment in her career when she had two New York City shows; at the Whitney Biennial and at the New Museum.[10] That same year 2017, she was part of the Istanbul Biennial.[10]

After fighting breast cancer for years, Upson died of metastatic breast cancer at New York City's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the evening of August 18, 2021.[11][10]

In 2003, after trespassing onto an abandoned property across the street from her parents' home in San Bernardino, Upson discovered boxes of ephemera: letters, legal documents, diaries, photographs, all belonging to one man who she later dubbed 'Larry.'[12][13][8][14][15] She kept the boxes for a year, unsure of what to do with them, but, in 2004, the house mysteriously burnt down, and she decided to begin tracing the life of 'Larry' through her artwork.[8]

For the next seven years, she produced an ongoing body of work, The Larry Project, creating a narrative through the faulty memory of the documents and her own fantasies. The work exists in a variety of mediums: drawing, sculpture, video, and performance.[13] She discovered that 'Larry' styled himself after Hugh Hefner and partied at the Playboy Mansion; he also was involved in a few different self-help programs, including Jungian analysis, chakra cleansing, Gestalt Therapy, and Erhard Seminars Training.[14][16] His hyper-masculine "Ladies' Man" persona became a site of exploration for Upson's own performances of gender, power, and desire.[13]

Untitled (2009), from The Larry Project, at the Rubell Museum DC in 2022

In 2008, Upson made a life-size doll version of 'Larry,' that she enacted different scenes with, switching roles as his daughter, mother, and sexual partner.[15][8] In 2008, Upson also made "The Grotto," a fiberglass replica of the infamous cave-like swimming pool at the Playboy Mansion.[12] Inside the sculpture, Upson projected videos of herself, wearing silicon prostheses of breasts and genitalia, straddling the 'Larry' doll.[8] In 2009, Upson cast the 'Larry' doll into charcoal, and used the form to make drawings against the gallery wall, slowly destroying the charcoal form in the process.[17] In 2011, Upson cast architectural copies of 'Larry's' former house into soft pink latex, as well as other objects, like a chandelier and an iron gate.[8] In "Mirrored Staircase Inversion (San Bernardino)" (2011), Upson went back to the site of the original house, which was now an empty dirt lot. There, she dug into the ground an inverted replica of the twin staircases that had led into 'Larry's' bedroom, and cast the giant hole in latex, creating a skin of the non-existent house.[8][17] Themes of twinning, mirror images, and negative copies emerge throughout the project, as Upson drew on the pervasive fantasy of the twin Playboy Bunnies and the discovery of her own reflection in a complete stranger.[16][13][12]

A select list of exhibitions by Upson: