James Casebere
Sean Kelly Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition of its new gallery in Chelsea with recent works by James Casebere.
Over the last twenty years Casebere has carefully built increasingly complex models that are then photographed in the studio. Casebere's table-size models are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms, and emptied of extraneous detail. The models draw on architectural, art historical and cinematic sources. Casebere's early work focused on American mythologies such as the "West" and the suburban home. Since 1992 his subject matter has increasingly focussed on institutional spaces and the relationship between social control and societal structure. His most recent works depict detailed architectural constructions of communal and historical spaces that are paradoxically abandoned and solitary. As UCLA Professor Anthony Vidler writes "Casebere's "spatial unconscious" is in photographic representation, an opening through vision into the psychopathology of lived space, a space that blurs all the traditional distinctions between the space and the space represented".
The exhibition will include works from 1999 to the present which are being shown in New York for the first time., Casebere's latest works are inspired by Thomas Jefferson's utopian Monticello, the indigenous architecture of the Caribbean island of Nevis, traditional Japanese architecture and an imagined gallery space. In these works Casebere conceptually articulates "the revelation of an implied future for architectural space, a space at once of our unconscious and our lived reality, that describes the fragile treaty between the two".
To coincide with the exhibition, Sean Kelly Gallery, in conjunction with Charta Editions, Milan, will publish a two hundred-page monograph on Casebere's work, titled James Casebere, the Spatial Unconscious with essays by Professor Anthony Vidler of UCLA, freelance writer Chris Chang and Jeffrey Eugenides author of The Virgin Suicides. The catalogue will also be available in a special deluxe limited edition of 26, each of which will include a signed and numbered original photograph.
James Casebere is represented in numerous public and private collections in Europe and North America including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Forthcoming exhibitions include James Casebere and Glen Seator: The Architectural Unconscious at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia, PA (this traveling exhibition originated at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover MA) and a solo exhibition in Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles, France.