Larassa Kabel was born in 1970 and received her BFA with honors from Iowa State University in 1992. She has worked as an artist assistant, birth photographer, and an art educator as well as co-founding Chicken Tractor, an artist-centric nonprofit dedicated to increasing the level of professional art practice through education, exhibition and workshops. Her work has been widely exhibited and has been collected by a number of institutions including the Des Moines Art Center and the White House. She currently works full time in her studio.
Kabel’s work gravitates towards uncomfortable subjects, using art as a tool for clarity by asking questions that may have many answers but only one truth. How do we encounter suffering with compassion, propagate grace, open ourselves to a relationship with death, and recognize the nature of power? Each inquiry rings like a bell that was a cup until it was struck. Kabel’s work reminds us that it is easy to be unconscious through most of our lives but that unconsciousness leaves us unprepared for the inevitable times when our better natures must be called upon. She invites us to embrace what we would rather ignore through a combination of seductive surface and arresting images, and in doing so, she draws people into conversations they didn’t realize they were hungry for.