Sing Sing

Best known for his large-scale photographs of flooded and abandoned architectural structures, James Casebere has been working with constructed photography for over thirty years. A member of the “Pictures Generation” that emerged in the late 1970s and included, among others, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, Casebere makes table-sized scale models that he then photographs in the studio. The scale models are made of foam core and paint while the flooded images are achieved with an artists’ resin that dries to a fluid-looking surface. Casebere’s earlier bodies of work dealt with quintessential American subjects such as the Western and the suburban home, based on historical and cinematic sources. In the early 1990s, however, his subject matter shifted to more institutional spaces like Sing Sing. Here, the artist investigates such topics as social control, the history of incarceration, and how architecture’s form relates to its purpose. “Photography resonates with me because it manipulates our perception of the world around us,” Casebere has said. “I am interested in photography as a means of persuasion, of propaganda and constructing histories. I am interested in how photography creates and reconstructs reality.” (“Staged, Performed, Manipulated,” curated by Andrea Inselmann and presented at the Johnson Museum January 24 – June 7, 2015)