Nate Larson
Burden of Truth
June 27–July 26, 2008

Two-person exhibition with Kris Lindskoog.

“Epiphanies revealed through falling down flights of stairs. Healing spells transferred through television programming.
Fortune cookie numbers used to win lottery prizes. Dreams of wounds manifested in real life. Hidden messages in cigarette smoke.

Clad in a short sleeve white dress shirt and striped tie, I whisper these and other stories taken from my life and the lives of those around me. The clothes function elusively; I’m the every person – the salesperson at the store, the co-worker at the office, the religious zealot on the street corner. I’m a storyteller, weaving tales of ordinary days gone peculiar, of insignificant objects that suddenly take on extraordinary significance. The nature of the photographs assures you that this is a “document” – the objects in the photographs presented as “proof” of an experience, of a sign, of a realization.

Photographs exist as fragmented moments removed from context, but we want to believe, need to believe, that reality can be recorded. That the intangible can be made concrete and that absolute proof exists. The photographs reveal the narrative visually, leading the viewer from one image to the next. Some of the photographs are injected with a textual narrative – after all, what can we use to communicate if not language, if not the photographic image? If we cannot believe photographs, what can we believe? If a glistening product filled with promise in an advertisement will not fix us, what will?”