L.A. Habitat: Kaari Upson

L.A. Habitat is a weekly series that visits with 16 artists in their workspaces around the city.

This week’s studio: Kaari Upson; Koreatown, Los Angeles. Last December, I visited Kaari Upson’s spacious studio, which is located on an unassuming block in Koreatown. At the time, the artist was hard at work preparing sculptures for an upcoming group show, “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947–2016,” which opened at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in March. The studio space is situated between an office in the front and an outdoor area in the back, where recycled couches and sectionals are piled on top of each other. Upson has included domestic objects in her work for a while, most notably in “The Larry Project,” which she began in 2007. The ongoing series was inspired by her parents’ neighbor, whose house was decimated in a wildfire. Upson uses actual possessions she salvaged from the fire in her work, which explores the neighbor’s house and the objects it once contained. “That house, and re-creating the internal pockets inside the house, became a forefront,” she told me. “I was always very interested in the domestic.”

At the time, Upson was working on trashcan molds to be displayed in the Hauser show. “I’ll think about the architecture of the space and then think about how they can be formed, because they are endlessly mutable,” she said. “There can be two of them incorporated, leaning against themselves. Or I can make one, make it hard, and make the other one off of it, which would then push a new negative space into it.” Upson’s studio practice includes sculpture, painting, drawing, and video, though she told me that the different mediums all inform each other in some way. “These are sculptures, for example, but when I make them, they end up being quite painterly.”

In addition to work that she’s actively creating, the studio houses many pieces that seem to be in a state of indefinite gestation. “I don’t throw anything out. Sometimes sculptures end up totally ordinary and I don’t know what to do with them. I keep a stack of the ones that become ordinary, and sometimes I’ll revisit one a year later and realize that I was seeing it wrong.”

Upson received her B.F.A. from CalArts in 2007 and currently lives in Los Angeles, though she owns a place in New York as well. I asked her what it was like living on the West Coast now. “I’ve never seen so many people want to live here and not New York. But I don’t have much to say about L.A.’s new development,” she said. “There is one sad thing, though. I’m not part of the old generation romanticizing the old days, but there was nothing like working when nobody was looking. There used to be nobody in the studio. It would just be me making decisions. A lot of artists were in L.A. because no one was hovering over us. It was entirely different. Thank God I didn’t put myself out there, because people very quickly want to define you. I want to make work that confuses people.”

Below, a look around Upson’s Koreatown studio.

ALL PHOTOS: KATHERINE MCMAHON

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"You'll see the kind of couches and the mattresses that I make everywhere on the streets of L.A."

"This is the beginning. We paint latex over it and it becomes a skin. The skin records every amount of detail down to the stitch."

A workspace in the studio.

One of the Angelina Jolie masks that Upson has used in her videos. "Angelina Jolie as this very odd, symbolic, therapeutic object is becoming a conceptual part of a larger project," she said. "She's gone from wearing Billy Bob's blood and making out with her brother—all of these taboo incidents that revolted people—to becoming a saintly figure. I'm also kind of obsessed with the transformation of her body and America's obsession with her transformation." Describing her in-process work, she admitted, "I don't know what it is yet. I have to go down these weird roads to find out."

Upson calls these Angelina Jolie lip drawings "totally desirable and totally repulsive at the same time."

Upson in her studio.

"I'm a big buyer of silicone," she said, describing how the molds are created. "Each mold gets destroyed in the process of making. There's no repeat, but I do recast objects a lot. I'll endlessly cast until they're falling apart. I'm interested in that. But the rerecording of the object is through the skin, and the skin deteriorates each time we record it."

Stills from a video project, which incorporates one of her original couch molds and her Angelina Jolie masks, among other pieces. Upson described the production as "very ritualistic." "I had no idea what was going to happen," she said. "I'm not sure if I'm going towards a place of knowing, but I don't really care."

"When is a piece done? It's a very painterly question," she said. "It's all about multiple marks, multiple gestures—no individual 'genius' marks. It's done when the sculpture is done, and when the thing holding it up is done. Otherwise, the face of it is done in the first mark."

Upson described her sculpture-making process. "The first marks you make are on the surface, and as you build up the structure, you can't really see the first marks you made anymore so you're working blindly. At the very end, when you're peeling it, you have no idea what you're going to get. This process has to happen very quickly, and it needs to stay wet and moving, because if silicone dries it doesn't adhere to itself. There's a multiplicity of mark-making."

Recycled sectionals and couches. "You'll find a lot of this kind of thing on the streets of L.A."