RHINEBECK, NY.- ‘T’ Space will present an installation of new sculptural work by James Casebere. This exhibition will be on view from July 20 – October 13, 2024 at the Archive Gallery, on the ‘T’ Space Reserve: 60 Round Lake Road in Rhinebeck, NY.

James Casebere’s work has addressed architecture from the start by building models to photograph. In the late ’80s, and early ‘90’s, Casebere built larger sculptural installations, but only recently has felt compelled to design new structures—first, specifically for photographs, and second, to imagine these new structures built in real space.

For this exhibition, Casebere will present a new series of large-scale wooden geometric sculptures that engage notions of synthetic nature: bio-design—or self-generating forms that suggest organic or inorganic growth. The impulse behind the sculpture was, for Casebere, partly about real life experience instead of on-screen, and the materiality, space, and use of light—crafting an analog experience that engages all the senses in a social context, similar to his Pavilion for 2 or 3 in Chatham, NY. These five sculptures were created for an indoor gallery or domestic space related to, but not participatory like the pavilion. Here, Casebere embraces the traditional vernacular Japanese method of wood preservation known as Shou Sugi Ban, and uses a sustainable bamboo plywood as the base material, constructing it out of planar surfaces, similar to the way he builds the original table-top models. While the burning creates a warm, soft, and organic surface instead of something cold and hard like steel, it refers to the destructiveness of fire, and hence, change over time. It seems to present both tradition, and technological innovation, past and future simultaneously.

The exhibition will open to the public during Upstate Art Weekend (July 20 – 21), and James Casebere will be present in the gallery to speak with visitors on Saturday, July 20 from 3-5 PM.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, featuring an extensive interview with James Casebere and Steven Holl.

James Casebere (born 1953) grew up outside of Detroit. He studied with Siah Armajani as an undergraduate student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and with John Baldessari as a graduate student at Cal Arts.

For over 40 years, Casebere has built and photographed architecturally based models, which explore the relationship between sculpture, photography, architecture, and film. Starting with Sonsbeek ’86, in Arnhem, Holland through 1992, Casebere made large-scale sculptural installations.

His work is in the collections of and has been shown at major museums around the world including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum (New York); the Tate Gallery (London); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles); and many others. He has had solo shows at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela (Spain); Museum of Modern Art Oxford (UK); the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art (Ohio); the Indianapolis Museum of Fine Arts (Indiana); and other museums.

In 2016, his work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany and has been included in exhibitions highlighting the work of what is now widely regarded as the Pictures Generation, the title of a 2009 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Casebere is the recipient of three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, three from the New York Foundation for the Arts and one from the Guggenheim Foundation. In April 2019, he was awarded the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize and is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.