From her earliest works from “The Larry Project” to her later series drawn from the contents of her childhood home in San Bernardino, California, the late artist delved into the rich connections between people and their domestic surroundings, both physically and psychologically and across familial generations. In latex, silicone, charcoal, paper and video, the body and its traces dissolve into the objects and architecture of the home, only to reappear again as fragments and uncanny presences that reverberate across Upson’s charged forms.

Larry’s specter, and artifacts from his home, filtered into early examples of her cast sculptures on view in House to Body Shift. In 2011, Upson produced a series of latex sculptures, all pigmented in tones reminiscent of white skin and modeled after fences, chandeliers, and staircases reminiscent or recreated from what she had witnessed there.

This became a recurring image in Upson’s drawings, including in the four-part House to Body Shift (2012) that gives this exhibition its title. There, the staircase is now on its side, mirrored and doubled, creating an ocular presence alongside notations of “fold” and “unfold,” referring perhaps to the folds of paper or skin.

Upson’s earlier Kiss Paintings, such as Untitled (Kiss) (2008), exemplify the romantic bonding of self and other – another kind of doubling, or twinning, that featured in her practice. The artist painted a self-portrait on one panel, and a portrait of Larry on the other; while still wet, she pressed them together, so that each face became partly imprinted on the other.

In 2012, Upson turned to working with soft furniture, including mattresses, sofas and other objects found discarded near her studio in Los Angeles. The artist cast these forms out of silicone and urethane, fascinated with the possibility of lifting and replicating not only their surfaces and “skins,” but also the emotional, psychological and physical traces of those who had used them (she had also earlier encountered an unusual number of mattresses in the rooms of Larry’s house).

Upson’s dynamic application of pigment features in two works from 2013, 98 and 156, twin- and queen-sized mattresses rendered in bright tones of green, blue and yellow that illustrate her vivid exploration of both beauty and the grotesque.

The grotto in Upson’s works refers to the notorious structure at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, the site of countless parties and orgies; but also to the cheap imitations that Larry designed and installed on his own properties. Videos that the artist shot within her installation entitled The Grotto (2008–09) depict the artist wearing her sexual prostheses, mimicking the drawl and affected sexiness of playboy bunnies. Caves and grottos represent private, secluded spaces; homes for creatures of the night. Upson brings the dark underbelly of this hyper-masculine world to the fore, but also revels in her fascination with it, rendering the home as a surreal site of trauma, memory and intrigue.