Aperture Foundation and the Photography Program in the School of Art,
Media and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design present:
Fall 2011 Photography Lecture Series
James Casebere

Monday, April 2, 2012
6:30 pm
FREE Admission, seating is on first-come, first serve basis

Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th floor
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

Aperture Foundation and the Photography Program at the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design are pleased to present a lecture with artist James Casebere. 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.

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. Based on architectural, art historical, and cinematic sources, his table-sized constructions are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms. Casebere’s abandoned spaces are hauntingly evocative and oftentimes suggestive of prior events, encouraging the viewer to reconstitute a narrative or symbolic reading of his work.

While his 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.

In 2001, Sean Kelly Gallery presented an exhibition of Casebere’s works from 1999 to the present, including those inspired by the indigenous architecture of the Caribbean Island of Nevis, traditional Japanese architecture, and an imagined gallery space. This exhibition also featured a now well-known body of work inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s utopian Monticello. In the following years he has continued to investigate a wide range of iconic architectural spaces, resulting in increasingly sophisticated layers of interpretation. Two photographs from his most recent series, Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY), were featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

Casebere is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including three from the National Endowment for the Arts, three from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and one from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His work has been collected by museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

James Casebere lives and works in New York.