James Casebere at Sean Kelly - New York - Brief Article

James Casebere's new work plays on our fascination with ruins, those poignant reminders of the futility of human efforts to create order. All from 2001, these photographs of miniature interiors built from foamcore and cardboard are modeled after historical and institutional spaces. Using resin to represent water, Casebere floods the spaces, leaving them devoid of any sign of human habitation--every stick of furniture seems to have been swept away.

Familiarity quickly turns to strangeness. Shafts of bright light pierce the waterlogged gloom from some hidden source outside the picture frame, creating a mysterious interplay with the deep shadows. These convincing images make it appear as if water fills the rooms to a depth of a foot or two, thus providing a reflective surface that lengthens doors and columns, doubles arched openings, and mirrors back distorted versions of eccentric architectural details. Sometimes the slightly rippled water casts strange abstract patterns of light on the ceilings above.

The architectural selections differ widely, and Casebere has revealed the sources of some of these spaces. Pink Hallway 2, with its pale pink walls and white Neo-Classical trim, references the interior of Bulfinch Hall at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. A door at the far end of the flooded barrel-vaulted space is left open, but the dark shadows hide any glimpse of the room beyond. Monticello, modeled after Jefferson's historic home, is equally elegant, even as water creeps up the drenched wainscoting and French doors.

Other spaces are more stark. Several works use the tunnels of abandoned sewers in Berlin as their source. Here, light from above strikes a succession of low arches that seem to extend infinitely. The walls of another flooded hallway glow a rich yellow and orange. As light streams in from the open doorways, it is not readily apparent that this site was once a slave fort on the island of Nevis. Yet another is based on the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (now an art space) where the abandoned skylit cell blocks radiate from a central rotunda.

While the interiors derived from Monticello and Phillips Academy have a historical basis, the other works exist in a less specific time. They could just as well be Roman cisterns or ancient aqueducts, reminding us that certain architectural forms have changed little over the centuries. Thus, the water that floods them could just as likely be the agent of time and neglect as of some recent disaster. As the apocalyptic edge of these works is softened by the faded colors and general sense of mystery, we feel we have entered an alternative universe that exists somewhere between dream and nightmare.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group