THIS IS NOT A DINOSAUR New Work by Al Larsen
Champlain College Art Gallery| Burlington, Vermont
Exhibition: June 24 – July 26, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, June 26, 5:30–8pm
Champlain College Art Gallery is pleased to present This is Not a Dinosaur, a solo exhibition of new and archival work by artist, musician and educator Al Larsen, on view June 24 through July 26, 2026. An opening reception will be held Friday, June 26 from 5:30 to 8pm, coinciding with the release of Critters Encore, the first album in 29 years from Larsen’s band, Some Velvet Sidewalk.
The exhibition takes its title as both a provocation and an homage. A play on René Magritte’s famous pipe and Michel Foucault’s philosophical unpacking of it This is Not a Dinosaur asks what happens when a word meets an image, when a symbol carries the weight of extinction and nostalgia simultaneously, and when the idea being represented refuses to stay still. The dinosaur is a symbol rooted in the visual language of Larsen’s early 90s DIY show posters and album designs. It also becomes a metaphor for a petrochemical ghost, a childhood fixation, a joke about irrelevance; and, in 2026, something that is quietly coming back around, 1990’s culture.
The diverse media on display include posters, sketches, plotted line work paintings, and ephemera from a person deeply imbedded in the process and not the perfection of making. At the heart of the exhibition is a body of new pieces created using a pen plotter, made during a recent art residency at the Center for Machine Arts in Peekskill, NY. While the drawings look uncannily hand-made, they are printed by the plotter and then worked further with brush and ink, layering human gestures over machine output.
Larsen’s practice draws on the philosophical and ecological writing of Timothy Morton. Morton’s concept of the “mesh” (in a nut shell) describes the entangled, uncomfortable interdependence of all living things where keeping the boundaries permeable or the overlap visible is itself a form of integrity. The exhibition holds several themes at once: climate anxiety without resolving it, 90’s nostalgia without retreating into it, and how presence in the form of a letter, poster, or song still matters greater than something overly generated, synthetic, and/or inauthentic. Here the artist treats analog media as an active signal; still transmitting and still receivable, still relevant.
Visitors are invited to play the new Some Velvet Sidewalk record,Critters Encore, as a soundtrack while moving through the exhibit. It is their first record since 1997, marking a return that this exhibition extends into visual space.
In addition to being a musician and artist, Al Larsen is the Chair of Creative Studio at Champlain College.
In a recent online article posted by Stereogum, Some Velvet Sidewalk was cited as being listed in a journal by Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain under the words: bands i like.