NEW YORK, NY.- For his second exhibition with OK Harris,
Ted Larsen has created a project of specifically made objects that deal with serial form and repetition. The nearly identical objects were created as an experiment to discover how extremely similar works can appear to be completely different and the effect on how we perceive these visual differences. The work is deployed around the exhibition space with a precise, highly organized, nonhierarchical system to highlight both sameness and distinctions. There is great historical precedence for serial objects and this kind of arrangement of them. Additionally, Larsen created these materially unorthodox works to question the relevance of that canonical approach to High Art Practice.
Ted Larsen (b. 1964, USA) is a nationally exhibiting artist and Pollock-Krasner Foundation recipient with a BA from Northern Arizona University. His work has been widely exhibited in museums in the US as well as in over eighty gallery exhibitions. He received a grant from the Surdna Foundation, a residencies with the Edward F. Albee Foundation and Asilah Arts Festival in Morocco, where he was the selected to be the USA representative. Larsen work has been featured in multiple national arts related magazines, had reviews in numerous prominent metropolitan newspapers and published in many books. Larsens work can be found in public, institutional, and private collections.
The works I create supply commentary on minimalist belief systems and the ultimate importance of High Art practice. An artist's work usually adheres to the construct of a cohesive direction with the work illustrating a single theme or underscoring a didactic agenda. But such a logical order has no specific place in my studio practice.
Introducing alternative and salvage materials to my own formally driven abstract sculpture, I hope to bring purist shapes and surfaces back down to earth. I quest for new materials, "non-art materials" to create my work. I am constructing bricolage works in order to re-purpose the materials and re-identify their meanings: to re-contextualize and re-label the idea of Ready-mades. It is my on-going experimentation with contexts, hybrids, and scale.
The works keep possession of pleasing formality and visceral elegance while making fun of modernist purity. This is a tribute to anti-triumphalism, the spontaneous, non-hierarchical, un-monumental thematic artistic landscape which offers no specific resolution and no isolation of meaning.