Once Upon A Time – When Form Was Fluid
In this series of photo based montages, the Larsons explore the imagined life of animal/human hybrid creatures in their own fully developed world where they can view themselves as the subject in a rich pageantry of experiences. In this world they have authority, conjure snake medicine, discuss issues of importance and mourn the loss of their own kind.
Within these digitally manipulated images the format is vertical in order to explore the AXIS MUNDI concept: above, middle (or axis) and below. As a collaborative team, Dean sets the “mise en scene” developing layered images from their travels to Europe and here in America. When the surreal landscape has been created, Laura then selects the animal hybrid(s) that will best suit the feeling of the landscape. The feeling elicits a story for the viewer to ponder. Sometimes she combines her own sculpted animal heads with other sculpted bodies in iconic poses in order to achieve an action that references cultural history.
These images are presented as heat infused photos on aluminum. Available sizes: 29 x 12" and 42 x 18"
These images debuted at the historic Fine Arts Building in 2022. The Fine Arts Building is located at 811 W. 7th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90017
The following essay regarding this work is written by Los Angeles art critic and curator Mat Gleason:
DEAN AND LAURA LARSON: SURREAL HOPE
Cinema in general and Hollywood in particular seem to have surgically removed Surrealism from Fine Art. With their blockbusters and character universes, movies alter reality for a psychological tickling and big box office. But popcorn is not an entree. The viewing public ultimately needs the substance that fine art delivers and somewhere, some way, Surrealism will emerge in fine art. There and then it will be committed to delivering sophisticated commentary on the collective consciousness we call our world.
In a fraught ecological moment, artists Dean and Laura Larson look beyond the peril our species face and see the connectedness of the planet as a worthy subject. When one species is threatened are we not all threatened? Laura sculpts exquisite bronzes of animals, displayed as sculpture in their own fine art context. Dean is a world class photographer, shooting and exhibiting since digital photography was a dream reserved for those sniffing the darkroom chemicals. The two artists, masters of their individual media, collaborate as a stance that caring about the earth may be the only way to save it.
The result of this collaboration is a new type of Surrealism. The Larson brand of Surrealism does not illustrate dystopian psychological strife. Since that is how the present reality appears to people more and more each day, to be surreal in contemporary times is to portray a world of hope, a world where no species is under the threat of imminent immolation. These works imagine a different avenue for humanity to take. They implore a collective investment in the imagination of what we know to be real and what we can manifest as the real world we want to live in.
The unique construction of the actual art object that contains the representation of the collaboration is on purpose. Consider these works to be scrolls. Of all the parchment possibilities throughout civilization, nothing is more revered and sacred as a scroll. From the pentateuch on down, the law is written on a scroll. Magic spells are composed on a scroll.
As art, scrolls are most associated with the east, both in the myriad scroll painting tradition centered in Tang Dynasty China and the Cheriyal painting tradition from India. To have the Larsons’ visual prayer for the earth and all its species as a scroll connects the world of today and tomorrow with the knowledge, hope, and traditions of the ancients.
Dean’s photography and Laura’s sculptures are successful on their own. Their special collaboration combines their visions to successfully expand our consciousness on what it means to care about the world, about the future, about each other. These open-ended narratives forego the cloying preachiness of populist politics for a broader visual summation of the serenity we all desire. Every viewer can make their own associations but arrive at the same conclusion - the world is worth preserving and art is the vehicle to maintain such inspiration.