Larassa Kabel | Any Minute Now
The first time I fell in love I was 2 years old. I don’t have a memory of when this started just the stories my parents have told me about how mad I was for The Wonder Horse, but that love kept going for years and years and became a foundation of who I am…a horse girl.
The Wonder Horse is a plastic bouncy horse from the Kresge Store. My parents had no money, but as my dad says, “We had to get it for you.” I’m 50 now, and that horse is still on my front porch. I don’t know what to do with it, but I can’t seem to let it go.
Years after owning many horses, I had a vision of a life-size drawing of a falling horse, and it made my heart drop. I saw a room hung with giant drawings of horses in free fall that create a space of meditation and disaster. Because a horse falling IS a disaster. Despite how strong they are, they are also incredibly fragile. If they fall, they tend to break, and if they break, there’s nothing to be done. In essence, a part of me was telling me to kill the thing I love. It took me several drawings to figure out why.
The horses exist in a blank non-space, because to put them into a landscape would create a narrative in the real world, and they aren’t really that. They are more like a visual poem, representing the internal: condition we are all experiencing a journey of unknown duration that ends with our mortality. We are all in a free fall that began before we were even aware we were falling. Outwardly the work seems dark, but it is a reminder to look towards the light.
View works by Larassa Kabel included in the Any Minute Now series on mobergshop.com