ASHLAND, Oregon — Lately, I attended the opening of an exhibition on my work with different artists, Disguise the Restrict: John Yau’s Collaborations, on the Schneider Museum at Southern Oregon College (SOU), curated by Stuart Horodner.
I met SOU portray and drawing teacher Kyle Larson at a dinner hosted by Scott Malbaurn, the museum’s government director, and discovered from our dialog that he had obtained his BFA from Sacramento State, the place he studied with Tom Montieth and Brenda Louie, and his MFA at Boston College, finding out with John Walker. As Larson talked about Walker, on whom I’ve written many occasions over the previous 45 years, and mentioned they had been nonetheless in contact, I turned extra inquisitive about his work.
The next night, I requested Larson if I might go to his studio and see what he was engaged on. His journey typified that of many artists who obtained MFAs from prestigious applications then went on to show in areas distant from the mainstream artwork world.
Kyle Larson, “Wind & Rubble” (2024), oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches (152.4 x 182.88 cm)
Beforehand, Larson had taught at Northwestern Oklahoma State College, which can be much more distant from the New York artwork world than the liberal faculty city of Ashland, Oregon. What do you prioritize whenever you make work in relative isolation and know you would possibly proceed to take action for the foreseeable future? Do you concentrate on the tendencies of the market, hoping to develop into a part of the scene, or do you make artwork in your studio and, because the poet Frank O’Hara, who rejected the institution’s style for somber confession, declared, “just go on your nerve”? I had the sensation that Larson had chosen the latter, and I wished to see the place this had led him.
Larson works in a big, empty classroom, the place college students generally maintain studio courses, and shops his artwork elsewhere. It’s the most austere studio I’ve ever visited due to its chilly institutional setting. His setting and experiences appear to be mirrored in his work: desert landscapes overlaid by clear areas marked by strains that evoke pure phenomena, similar to surging waves or beams of sunshine descending from the sky.
Kyle Larson, “Ghost Waves” (2024), oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches (121.92 x 152.4 cm)
The undulating desert is populated by useless bushes of various sizes, fish, dune buggy-like vehicles, bugs, birds, pigs, celestial orbs, and imagined creatures. Amid this hubbub, and appearing as a witness, Larson depicts a portray on an easel and artist’s instruments, although typically there is no such thing as a signal of the artist. And when there may be, he’s solely partly seen or semi-transparent, as in Francis Picabia’s transparencies and George L.Ok. Morris’s manipulation of Cubist planes. The work are views into the crumbling, turbulent world people have inhabited.
Larson has remodeled John Walker’s nuanced evocations of the Maine shoreline, and Seal Level, Maine, the place he has labored for a few years. Whereas I could make a connection between Larson’s use of a excessive horizon line and Walker’s work of teeming mud, water, and sky, and extra tenuous connections to Picabia, Morris, and artists similar to Philip Guston, and his picture of the solitary artist, I don’t discover the work spinoff. Larson is determinedly excavating a particular imaginative and prescient.
Kyle Larson, “Wind Push” (2024), graphite on paper, 9 x 12 inches (22.86 x 30.48 cm)
In Larson’s artwork, Walker’s high-horizoned conferences of sky and dirt have been changed by the plains, mountains, and hills of Oklahoma and Oregon. Oklahoma, specifically, is a state through which one doesn’t should look far to see proof of mining disasters, deteriorating cities, and decaying villages marked by poverty. And but for all their rootedness within the specificities of his circumstances, Larson’s work exceed their sources, and develop into one thing else. To say they’re about human-caused environmental catastrophe or local weather change is simply too reductive.
In “Last Holdout” (2024), Larson depicts the left arm of an unseen determine clutching a stretched canvas that faces away from us. The determine seems to be half-buried in filth and their head shouldn’t be seen. Traces across the determine evoke wavelengths from an unknown supply, whereas beams of sunshine descending from the highest fringe of the canvas recommend otherworldly presences. The longer we take a look at the artist’s expansive work, the extra we see. Within the foreground, the determine’s hand holds a long-stemmed pink flower, the one use of that colour in an in any other case darkish and moody palette. Larson doesn’t depict the seen world, however relatively what we make of it when it invades our goals and anxieties. His work invite us right into a layered world we are able to transfer round and get misplaced in, with no vacation spot.
Kyle Larson, Final Holdout (2024), oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches (91.44 x 121.92 cm)