The House

Kaari Upson's first artist's book turns years of source material, automatic drawings and sketches into something closer to a psychosexual graphic novel than a catalogue of works.

Organized through successive combinations and ordering systems rather than chronology, the book runs 224 pages with 130 color and 65 black-and-white reproductions, and remains the fullest published account of Upson's drawing practice. It was commissioned by UCCA for The Los Angeles Project in Beijing, a group of individual artist's books made in the tradition of John Baldessari and Edward Ruscha; the companion volumes were by Kathryn Andrews, Aaron Curry, Alex Israel, Matthew Monahan, Sterling Ruby and Ryan Trecartin. Edited by Karen Marta, designed by Brian Roettinger, and published by Koenig Books with UCCA.

Upson, who died in 2021, built much of a decade's work from the Larry Project, an obsessive reconstruction of a stranger's life assembled from papers and belongings left behind in an abandoned house near her childhood home in San Bernardino — material that fed a practice spanning drawing, sculpture, cast rubber and video, and that surfaces throughout this book.