Vaughan Larsen: ‘Everything I Could Ever Want'

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Image courtesy Museum of Wisconsin Art

Vaughan Larsen, ‘New Citrus’, 2021

Vaughan Larsen, ‘New Citrus’, 2021

Various exuberant and fertile tendrils snake through Vaughan Larsen’s exhibition “Everything I Could Ever Want,” on view at MOWA-DTN through Jan. 14, 2024. Literally, the show is backdropped by their own fetching hand-designed, vegetal-patterned wallpaper, against which plays out a frolicking exploration of identity in the form of photographic portraiture. Within the socio-political landscape of 2023, this verdant visual display might be read from the outset as anything from postmodern social politics to pre-Adamic innocence, though the longer one remains in Larsen’s garden, the more natural it all seems.

Larsen, a Wisconsin-born, Los Angeles-based, trans-feminine artist, employs the camera as a tool of “self-inquiry.” Large, staged color prints from that journey fill the walls of the gallery inside Saint Kate-the Arts Hotel along with tropical plants, a campy video, and, during the opening, Larsen themself offering a lively and generous performance. Aside from a few cameos from other queer and trans subjects, the show feels mostly like the efflorescence of a single migratory and searching soul.

We see Larsen effervesce and blossom before our eyes in several of the photographs. Nature and human merge in The New Citrus, where a tangerine-cheeked Larsen and another partially obscured individual are depicted as ripening oranges in the lush bows of a tree. The artist-as-nature imagery merges with art historical themes as well. For instance, a brilliantly constructed Untitled piece enacts something like the Sistine Chapel’s Creation of Adam scene, though in Larsen’s work the would-be Adam is completely consumed by leaves, and the would-be Father by flowers. This delicate photographic exchange plays out under a warm mauvy sky and is presided over by a moon that seems to know everything.

Broader Concerns

These running motifs intertwine with broader concerns about identity and Queering with the slow sure delicacy of vining vegetation. While the imagery is overtly and symbolically interested in subverting gender, sex, and historic norms, it does so with such humility and grace that it all feels, well, natural. Nature and human grow together literally and figuratively throughout the show, propagating and flowering, and in the end, presumably, returning to a shared earth like dust. But in the meantime, carpe diem. Because Larsen so thoroughly universalizes their human journey and so gleefully spreads a radiating spirit, one would have a difficult time dwelling on the political aspects the work for too long. Some gardeners prefer natural gardens, others ordered and manicured ones, but even the most forbidding weeder would pass over a flower that blushed just so perfectly.

Given the divisiveness and prejudice swirling the issues Larsen is addressing, especially in rural Wisconsin from where they hail, “Everything I Could Ever Want” is surprisingly unprovocative. Not unsubversive, not unmoving, but without the explicit preoccupation with provoking. Rather, it feels joyful, celebratory, and expansive. It made me think of “queer” as something like “original,” rather than secondary or oppositional. Before it All, and innocent. Which may be the ultimate humanistic takeaway from Larsen’s life, acts, and art of queering; to make a case for the strangeness of everything to the point that difference has no choice but to retreat to the margins beyond the gates of a forever weird, universally odd, and gorgeously diverse earthly paradise. 

Listings: November 19 – 25

Mitchell Street Arts (MISA)

• Art Therapy
• Sunday, November 19, 12–2:30 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Kohl’s Art Studio: Celebrating Lois Ehlert
• Sunday, November 19, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Contemporary Craft Exhibition and Sale

• INOVA Gallery at Kenilworth East
• Sunday, November 19, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Guest Gallery Talk: “Art, Life, Legacy”
• Sunday, November 19, 1–2 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tour: Architecture and Collection Highlights
• Sunday, November 19, 2–3 p.m.

Milwaukee Public Library East Branch

• Art for All!
• Tuesday, November 21, 9 a.m.–7:45 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Kohl’s Art Studio: Celebrating Lois Ehlert
• Friday, November 24, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Cedarburg Art Museum

• Christmas at CAM
• Friday, November 24, 5–8 p.m.

Museum of Wisconsin Art

• Neo-Pop Painted Objects
• Saturday, November 25, 10 a.m.–1 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Kohl’s Art Studio: Celebrating Lois Ehlert
• Saturday, November 25, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Story Time in the Galleries: Celebrating Lois Ehlert
• Saturday, November 25, 10:30–11 a.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tour: Architecture and Collection Highlights
• Saturday, November 25, 2–3 p.m.

Saint Kate, the Arts Hotel

• AIR Time Art & Studio Tour
• Saturday, November 25, 5:30 p.m.