BROOKLYN, NY.- Sean Kelly and the Williamsburg Biannual announced James Casebere: The Spatial Unconscious, a major presentation of the artist’s work at the Williamsburg Biannual. Spanning four decades, and three floors, this exhibition brings together a selection of Casebere’s rarely seen works in various media many of which have not previously been shown in New York. Spanning from the mid-1980s to the present, the exhibition includes working Polaroids, waterless lithographs, early black-and-white and recent color photographs, as well as sculpture. Casebere has long been recognized for his innovative approach to photography, merging the sculptural and the architectural with the conceptual. As a central figure of the Pictures Generation, his practice has consistently challenged the boundaries of medium, using photography not as documentation but as the artwork itself to explore how individual and collective realities are constructed.

Casebere’s photographs address issues ranging from the psychological and personal to the social, historical, and political. Working with meticulously built models, he creates images that blur the line between fact and fiction, evoking the tension between permanence and fragility. His process - building, altering and re-imagining architectural forms - foregrounds photography as more than documentation, transforming it into a primary event that interrogates memory, truth, and power while reflecting on the shifting conditions of contemporary life.

Casebere’s sculptures extend his longstanding engagement with architecture, embracing materiality, light, and space as central concerns. His Pavilion for 2 or 3, installed at PS21 in Chatham, NY, is made of cross-laminated timber and brings this experience to the public space and natural world. His Shou Sugi Ban sculptures, featured in the exhibition, are constructed from sustainable bamboo plywood using the traditional Japanese technique after which they are titled. These large-scale geometric forms evoke both organic growth and architectural structure. Their charred surfaces embody a duality of preservation and destruction, tradition and innovation, offering an analog, sensory experience that underscores the passage of time while suggesting new possibilities for how we inhabit and imagine space.

Deeply informed by architecture, literature, politics, and cultural history, Casebere’s work reflects a persistent engagement with questions of place and identity, as well as broader social forces. From his earliest black-and-white experiments to his most recent photographs and sculptures, The Spatial Unconscious offers a rare opportunity to trace the evolution of an artist whose practice continues to mirror and question the narratives that shape both history and the present moment.