Built: Constructed Objects by Ted Larsen
June 13-July 20, 2008
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO – Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Built: Constructed Objects by Ted Larsen. Larsen’s evolving exploration of the detritus of consumer culture and minimal sculpture reaches a remarkable culmination in his first solo exhibition at Eight Modern. He transforms salvage material into intimate forms that he calls constructed objects. Traces of past lives are perceptible in the exactingly pieced-together fragments of scrap metal that constitute the surfaces of Larsen’s sculpture.
Larsen, a longtime resident of Santa Fe, was awarded a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation earlier this year. A successful painter, Larsen made an audacious transition from pastels to scrap metal in the tumultuous wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Reexamining his work at this watershed moment, Larsen felt inexorably compelled to move beyond the “innocuous.” The reclaimed pieces of steel Larsen uses are weathered and worn but irrepressibly durable, and their past lives give them qualities that are impossible to fabricate.
Such metals afford Larsen the opportunity to manipulate them in imaginative ways: cutting, painting and distressing them and affixing them over and around a wood substructure. Larsen approaches the artistic process with a craftsman’s meticulousness, requiring himself to build pieces that are tightly constructed, while remaining highly evocative and non-representative. “I’m looking for something that’s very enigmatic and is difficult for me to even verbalize,” Larsen said. “I want to remind the viewer of something they know inherently but can’t quite place.”
Larsen was born in Michigan in 1964 and attended Whittier College before graduating magna cum laude from Northern Arizona University in 1986. He has had more than two dozen solo exhibitions over the past decade and has been included in numerous group shows, including most recently Art on the Edge at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts. His work is included in numerous public and private collections, including those of major corporations such as NBC, PepsiCo, Forbes, Reader’s Digest, United Airlines, Honda, JPMorgan Chase and Capital One.
Eight Modern is open Monday through Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
For further information and image requests, contact Jaquelin Loyd or Mark Thoma via email at info@eightmodern.net or by phone at (505) 995-0231.