Watch as interdisciplinary artist Logan Larsen shares an inside look at how Hollywood iconography shapes his studio practice in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Art MFA Program.
Largely drawing on popular culture archives and queer histories, Logan Larsen (MFA ’27) stages works that probe longing, devotion, and the ways communities form around shared icons. His practice unsettles how history is remembered, shaped as much by research as by material experimentation, and offers new ways of imagining the objects that have defined and been defined by stardom. His large-scale Backdrop for a picnic in the Mouth of Hell reimagines a monstrous volcanic stone sculpture in an Italian Renaissance garden as a silkscreened canvas set piece — a cinematic fragment for a film not yet defined. In The Sugar Coffin, an installation built from hate mail sent by filmmaker Kenneth Anger to silent-film star Gloria Swanson, Larsen confronts the aura of celebrity through the lens of obsession. Here, Larsen’s own obsessions come into focus as he invites us into his MFA studio to further unpack his practice.
Filmed by Ashley Ross (MFA ’27) and edited by Erik Duda.