left: Below the Stairs, 2009,
salvage steel, Marine-grade plywood & glue, 6x2x6"
center: Imaginary Illusion, 2009, wood, salvage steel & glue,
6x2x6"
right: Heterotypic Structure, 2009, salvage steel & rivets,
30x70x1"
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 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 assemblages of detritus 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 ongoing 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,
nonhierarchical, UN-monumental thematic artistic landscape which offers
no specific resolution and no isolation of meaning.
Ted Larsen, 2009
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2009 Schmidt Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2009 Anne Reed Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho
2008 Pan American Art Projects, Dallas, Texas
2008 Eight Modern, Santa Fe, New Mexico
2008 OK Harris Works of Art, New York, New York
2007 Costello-Childs Art, Phoenix, Arizona
2007 LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2009 Andrea Schwartz Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2008 Albuquerque Museum, Biennial Southwest, Albuquerque,
NM
2008 New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM
2007 Lemmons Contemporary, New York, NY
2006 Wooster Art Space, New York, NY
2005 Fine Arts Museum, Santa Fe, NM
2004 Chase Gallery, Boston, MA
2004 Butters Gallery, Portland, OR