UW Art Dept. | Spring 2022 Visiting Artist Colloquium: Chris Larson

Chris Larson is a multi-media artist who engages his imagination in a number of different artistic disciplines, including sculpture, photography, drawing and filmmaking. What results is art that often makes a grim statement about human existence, but is also attention-grabbing for its sheer size or ornate detail. As a sculptor with impressive carpentry skills, he’s often concentrated on making incredibly elaborate, archaic-looking wooden machines from some bygone era. He does it in part to see where his imagination will take him, but also because of the way it engages the viewer. Richly metaphoric, Larson’s work dissolves clear boundaries between human and machine, purpose and absurdity, and the possibility of spiritual transcendence versus mechanistic determinism.