The interiors depicted in James Casebere’s photographs are strange, fey spaces, as if plucked from an alternate reality and brought to our own. In fact, the rooms and halls Casebere captures aren’t inhabitable at all; they’re architectural models the artist builds and shoots in his studio, manipulating light and perspective to give the illusion of life-size structures. A selection of these images, originally from various projects Casebere began as early as 1995, is now on view at the Sean Kelly gallery in New York. Many of these works allude to buildings of historical note and explore our relationship to institutionalized spaces. Two Bunk Cell, for example, presents a haunting, shadowy room with a single glowing window, the tiny cell raising questions about our understanding of the psychological impact of incarceration.
Casebere also directly references Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and other buildings from the American colonial era. For these images, he expertly re-created Federal-style stairways and corridors and then “flooded” these models with a resin that mimics water. The material seems to ripple and move, and light dances across the walls.
Through December 7 at Sean Kelly, New York; skny.com
