James Casebere

Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
Through June 9

Some institutional spaces possess an ineffable quality of absence, a lingering atmospheric memory of the countless anonymous individuals who had once occupied the space and are now gone. James Casebere’s often haunting photographs of his own institutional architectural constructions makes that absence palpable.

At Sean Kelly Gallery he displayed a series of large-scale, multi-paneled, digital chromogenic photographs mounted on plexiglas that appear to show the cavernous interiors of such places as underground sewers, a large living room of Monticello, a Japanese parlor with sliding screen walls, and the gallery space itself. In fact, these spaces, like those in his earlier photographs of such sites as the Eastern Pennsylvania State Penitentiary and Philips Academy, belong to the table-sized models he has constructed out of cardboard, styrofoam, paper and plaster.

The finely achieved construction—giving the appearance of rough, scraped and scarred plaster walls and many years of accumulated layers of paint¾is so convincing that one cannot help but imagine these photographs record the actual sites. Yet, there appears to be an intentional doll-house-like awkwardness in some details (such as the lack of molding in the neoclassical interiors, or the out-of-proportion risers in a staircase), which leaves no doubt that what one sees is an invention.

In many cases, as in Four Flooded Arches from Left, Pink Hallway #3, and Nevisian Underground #2, Casebere has filled the model with what appears to be clear or aqua-blue resin to simulate a flood. All these spaces, utterly evacuated of objects or people, have been lit to create a nebulous atmosphere of gloom, with reflections off the water and chiaroscuro effects revealing uncertain doorways and corridors of sinister suggestion.

The result is an uncanny, Piranesian architecture of the unconscious, registering not so much the actual institutional sites themselves as their symbolic appearance in the memories or dreams of those who have passed through them.




Jonathan Gilmore