09 Jun 2011

THE VIEW presents Chris Larson: The Artist as a Modern Sisyphus

THE VIEW, an exceptional new space for contemporary art at the Swiss side of Lake Constance, dedicates this second exhibition project to the American artist Chris Larson, who has become internationally known through the construction of monumental wooden machines and his surreal video narrations.

For the historic water reservoir, one of the four venues of THE VIEW, Chris Larson developed a new video work named Heavy Rotation. The protagonist of Heavy Rotation is the artist himself. The film sets, invented and built by Chris Larson, reach over three rooms lying on top of each other in a not nearer defined architecture. Through the eye of the camera the spectator looks into the studio of the artist, who continuously draws circles onto paper by following the rotation of a turntable. With great vehemence and obsessive absent-mindedness the movement is continuously repeated and at the end leads to a perforation of paper and base. Chris Larson climbs through the created hole into the room below and restarts with his Sisyphus work.

THE VIEW also presents the films Crush Collision and Deep North. Photographs, drawings and sceneries of film sets  give an extensive insight view of the manifold artwork of Chris Larson, who was born 1966 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Chris Larsons work has been presented for example at Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Nationalgalerie Berlin, The Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Video Section at Art Basel and currently at the Wiener Festwochen. Chris Larson comments in his art industrial production methods and visually falls back onto archaic images. He confronts us with inexplicable processes and thwarts the rhetoric of our information age with its emphasis on productivity, efficiency and rationality.