Congratulations to our recent MFA alum Austin Casebolt on their exhibition CANARY, presented at High Noon Gallery!
“In painting terms, the colors black and white indicate the presence and the absence of light, in his New York solo debut exhibition, multi-disciplinary artist Austin Casebolt (born 1994, Pikeville, Kentucky), pushes this binary to its breaking point, instigating and transcending the inherent contradictions around an object that simultaneously comprises his medium, subject matter, and content: bituminous coal. This excavation of coal is done through the mobilization of light as a medium, both in photographic processes and in the creation of surfaces that absorb and reflect ambient light.
A series of entirely new works from Casebolt assemblages rendered in tar, coal and paint on panel, and photograms, expose through their distinct visual poetics of humanity’s fraught dependence upon coal mining and the ambiguous understanding around this precious resource. Both taken wholly out of context and situated firmly in the coal belt of the American South, the works operate as vignettes of microscopic and monumental proportions.
The surfaces of Casebolt’s tar and coal assemblages are at turns confrontational and vulnerable, evoking volatile fragility, implicit violence, economic and ecological effect, and luxurious abundance that the materials suggest and embody in metaphor and reality.
The irregular coal fragments suspended in frozen pools, splatters and ripples of tar, produce a sensation that suggests both sinking and rising. This suspended motion echoes the temporal, sensory, and emotional limbo that underpins the work itself.”
Curated by Chelsea Steinberg Gay
