Kaari Upson: Good Thing You Are Not Alone

The Los Angeles-based artist’s large-scale, graphite-and-ink drawings—chaotic kaleidoscopes, swirling with images and fragments of text—introduce viewers to her defining preoccupations, but it’s the three-dimensional works in this show that succeed in recasting the everyday in a strange new light. Tract housing, Costco fare, domestic interiors, and the artist’s mother are prominent subjects. In one room, tinted urethane casts of well-worn furniture hang from the walls like misshapen parachutes or abandoned reptile skins. In the center of the gallery, soft-drink cans, cast in aluminum, bare “teeth” made of crystals. The cans and the fangs are part of Upson’s ongoing multimedia series, “MMDP (My Mother Drinks Pepsi),” which she started in 2014—a psychological exploration of consumerism that splits the difference between humor and horror. In “Idiot’s Guide Womb Room,” a related installation work, completed this year, a dark gallery furnished with shelving units displays arrangements of how-to books from the “Idiot’s Guide” franchise, enigmatic urethane forms, and looping videos. The main event, though, is an avalanche of dummies, dressed in Upson’s mother’s androgynous uniform of plaid shirt and jeans. (New Museum; Through Sept. 10.)