James Casebere: Works 1975-2010 is the most comprehensive monograph to date on this important American artist.
Casebere’s pioneering work has established him at the forefront of artists working with constructed photography. For the last thirty years, Casebere has devised increasingly complex models that are subsequently photographed in his studio. The construction of formally simplified architectural models-arenas, monasteries, tunnels, factories, are based on architectural, art historical and cinematic sources, his table-sized constructions are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms.
While earlier bodies of work focused on American mythologies such as the genre of the western and suburban home, in the early 1990s, Casebere turned his attention to institutional buildings. In more recent years, his subject matter focused on various institutional spaces and the relationship between social control, social structure and the mythologies that surround particular institutions, as well as the broader implications of dominant systems such as commerce, labor, religion and law.
The lighting in his photographs is dramatic, or rather it plays with the rhetoric of dramatic lighting, qualified by the sheer artifice of the architectural models themselves.
Edited by Okwui Enwezor, this major mid-career survey includes
several of Casebere’s lesser known early works, as well as previously unreproduced sculpture and photographs from 1975 to
2011. Enwezor contributes both an introduction and a conversation
with the artist. The volume also contains essays by Hal Foster and Toni Morrison.
James Casebere was born in 1953, in East Lansing, Michigan. He attended Michigan State University, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from which he graduated in 1976 with a B.F.A. In the fall of 1977, he attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, and received an M.F.A from Cal Arts in 1979.
James Casebere lives and works in New York.
Emiliana Tedesco
Info:
Wednesday, October 12, James Casebere will sign copies at Whitney Museum Store – Whitney Museum of American Art -New York
