Kaari upson biography of christopher

In 2005, while still a student at CalArts, Kaari Upson began a prodigious, open-ended examination into the life of a man she has never met.

Two years previously, she’d walked into the abandoned, foreclosed McMansion next door to her parents’ house, and there, between two different wildfires, she found reams of letters and legal documents — plus a mattress in every room.

The occupant of that ersatz Playboy Mansion became the absent heart of Upson’s all-absorbing “Larry Project,” which saw the artist produce paintings of Larry, videos of Larry, even a full-scale Larry doll. The theme of absent bodies continues in her more recent silicone casts of beds and couches, whose tumescent forms can feel at once despondent and lecherous.

Upson was born in San Bernardino, Calif., in 1972, and began her career as a painter; her recent mattress casts, she tells me pointedly, see her returning to objects with “four sid