Chris Larson
STILLNESS OF LABOR
US, 2023, 8:55
In the film Stillness of Labor, Chris Larson replicates 12 full-scale rooms using objects extracted from an abandoned garment factory in Tennessee to mirror the environment of the laborers. When labor was outsourced in 1998, the rural community was left without work in a town centered around industry. Larson recreates the architecture of the factory as a study of the anthropogenic imprint humans leave behind in spaces of heavy repetition.
Chris Larson is a multimedia artist living and working in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He integrates actions of film, sculpture, photography and drawing to respond to specific architectural spaces, sites, and their histories. Larson is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota. Since receiving his MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1991, Larson has received numerous awards including a New Work Project Grant from The Harpo Foundation, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and most recently a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. Larson has had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, The View Contemporary Art Space in Switzerland, and his work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In 2019, he co-founded Second Shift Studio Space of St. Paul, a nonprofit residency program and gallery serving artists/makers/thinkers who are marginalized as a result of their gender identity.
