Skin of the Real

Exploring dreams and reality in the art of Kaari Upson, on the occasion of her first retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

- Emily LaBarge

Well, if I try to make something beautiful, it never turns out that way,’ said Kaari Upson. And who doesn’t identify with that sentiment: the attempt, the failure, the try again, the fail again, the fail better? I must clarify that the American artist’s oeuvre is most certainly not not beautiful — and staggering, weird, striking, transportive, consoling. Perhaps the beautiful is more so when not an aim but a byproduct, a surprise, possibly (like all art) a matter of taste: one woman’s trash is, as they say, another woman’s treasure.

Couches that are and are not themselves, upturned, teetering on one side, sloping and slumping in dusky neon hues, a little bit haunted, a little bit alive. Soiled dayglo silicone mattresses hung on the wall like sloughed skin, like old and new, like urban relics, like visage-less portraits. (‘If you presented anything at CalArts with four sides and a face,’ Upson said of her education, ‘it was a painting.’) Hanging forests of slender synthetic limbs, cast from legs and trees, knots and knobbly knees, snaking termite trail dermis. Dollhouses, dredged from the past, made large, creepy and uninhabited, possessed and fulsome like all dollhouses are, regardless of scale. Forms that sidestep forms that are never stable, like domestic spaces, childhood, abject states, women.