From Facebook stalking to Google searching, the Internet has created unlimited opportunities to keep tabs on anyone and anything. Kaari Upson’s premiere exhibit at the Hammer Museum, however, takes the Internet’s tracking capability to a further level by delving into the life of a person she has never met.
“Kaari Upson,” which opens at the UCLA Hammer Museum today as a part of the Hammer Projects series, is the first chapter of a larger project based on the life of “Larry,” a man Upson has never met but has encountered through his personal belongings. With both hard evidence and computer research, Upson broaches the controversial boundaries of voyeurism and the moral ramifications thereof.
“There’s a lot of moral gray area that I’m starting to trespass on because it is this notion that all of this information is quite available to us,” Upson said about her research for this project. “You can get a hold of every address that somebody has lived in for like the last 30 years just by simply Googling their name and following different links.”
Her investigation began a few years ago when she followed her curiosity inside an abandoned house near where she grew up.
“I found these materials just tossed out in a house that was abandoned that I went inside to photograph,” she said. “I guess a great deal of clean-up was happening, and somebody’s personal items were just thrown in the trash.”
These items consisted of a few photographs, a journal and some other personal things. From these objects, Upson began a project-scale investigation of this man’s life. However, the project took a strong turn when she lost his journal, her most crucial piece of evidence.
“I started to realize that it wasn’t about what I actually had. It was about what wasn’t there,” she said. “So I started thinking about the project as working within the gaps and sort of establishing links between them.”
These gaps turned her research into a fictionalized project instead of a factual representation of this man’s life, and though some of her creations may hit on reality, she has no way of knowing every detail.
Even though Upson still possessed some original source material, she needed to create filters between reality and fantasy as a way of acquiescing with moral standards of society, a problem that repeatedly affects the subject matter of this exhibit.
“It’s really fascinating, the idea of using somebody’s source material, because you can’t use the original source material,” she said. “But once it’s mediated through one or two filters it starts to bring questions if it’s real or not.
“There were legal issues surrounding it that certain modes like painting and drawing allowed me to have more freedom with the original source material.”
These artistic fabrications on the original material intrigued Hammer curator Ali Subotnick. Subotnick met Upson last spring while visiting CalArts, where Upson was a student.
“It’s something I hadn’t seen before,” Subotnick said. “It’s got multiple endings and different lines and so many different forms. The story’s interesting, but also the work that comes out of the story is really interesting.”
The exhibit features an array of different artistic forms, with everything from video to a large-scale dummy of the main subject. Form itself becomes a way for Upson to illustrate different aspects of Larry’s story.
“It’s all about what I’m trying to say and which medium would be best to say it through,” she said. “I think the story unfolds in different ways, and one of the reasons I worked with different representational modes was to play with that.”
These notions of form and fiction led Upson to connect her own life to Larry’s, and the work that results is just as much a representation of her life as it is of his.
In order to more concretely demonstrate this idea within the art itself, Upson created what she calls “kiss paintings,” where she painted a portrait of herself and a portrait of him and pushed them together and pulled them apart when they were still wet.
“It was the only way that I actually could get them to merge together,” she said of this abstract technique. “So there’s a little bit of him on me and a little bit of me on him.”
Though some may be frightened by the intense nature of the project, Subotnick believes that the modern and controversial topic of the exhibit merits an array of reactions.
“There’s a lot of information, and it’s something that can be taken in with people at their own speed,” Subotnick said.
“Some people will hate it. … Some people will get scared. Some people will fall in love.”
Audiences might still wonder why Upson chose to investigate this man’s life versus someone else’s.
“It could be anybody,” Upson said in response to the question “˜why him?’ “I had very little information to start from, (and) from that it could start from anybody’s story and it would just kind of spiral out. I could link my life to anybody.”