LARASSA KABEL

“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” R.W. Emerson

Exploring that which makes us most uncomfortable, Larassa Kabel regularly traverses the emotional and intellectual space between life and death, love and loss, the powerful and the powerless. Through the drawing, painting, performance and sculpture, she confronts our view of ourselves “outside of Nature” and our desire to distance ourselves from our mortality. In the Death in the Family series, lush photos of dead animals being tenderly embraced by Kabel illustrate the continued relationship between the living and the dead and address the tension between Man’s relationship to Nature.

Larassa Kabel was born in 1970 and received her BFA with honors in 1992 from Iowa State University with an emphasis in fibers. She currently lives in Des Moines, IA where she works as a full time artist and independent curator. She has received numerous grants and awards including an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship, and her work has been shown nationally and is in several corporate and private collections including the Des Moines Art Center, the White House and the World Food Prize.