Chris Larson: Land Speed Record

For the past two decades, Minnesota-based artist Chris Larson has developed a multimedia practice rooted in sculpture. His work incorporates film, video, photography, and performance as well as drawing and painting. Often he integrates these elements into sculptural installations that reference architecture—from iconic buildings by architects such as Marcel Breuer to ordinary rural cabins to imaginary, sometimes illogical structures—while building a unique narrative structure.

Land Speed Record focuses on objects and memories left behind when their architectural enclosure has disappeared. Titled after a live album by acclaimed Twin Cities punk band Hüsker Dü, the piece explores a group of smoke-blackened objects—including antiques, auto parts, rock ephemera, master tapes, and musical instruments—from the childhood home of band member Grant Hart, which were retrieved from a 2011 fire. Stored for several years in Larson’s studio, these became the basis for a meditative film installation that forms both a portrait of an artist and a tribute to a moment in alternative music history. Playing intermittently in the gallery is a recent recording duplicating Hart’s breakneck drum speed and precision on the original Land Speed Record album. Photographs on view, made by Larson and Hart, reveal the drum kit in shadow, layered with the memories of the spaces the sounds once inhabited.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.