bio
Janice Caswell has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Savannah College of Art and Design, and Schroeder Romero Gallery (Brooklyn and NYC). Her work has been included in group shows in numerous museums and galleries including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Marlborough Gallery (NYC), ArtPace (San Antonio) and the Fleming Museum of Art (Burlington, VT). In 2017 Caswell received an Arts and Letters Award and a Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been a resident fellow at Yaddo, Maison Dora Maar (Ménerbes, France) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
artist statement
The dynamic tension between material vulnerability and endurance is a foundational theme of my practice. I seek out visual clues to this push and pull in architectural details, with particular focus on the makeshift and timeworn—the detritus of human endeavor. As I move through the manmade landscape, I inevitably notice the off-kilter construction-site barrier; a broken shutter; the outline of a former doorway, long plastered over. I photograph these structural marginalia, collecting image fragments of angles, color, patterns, texture, and light. The invented architecture of my 2D and 3D constructions distills thousands of such details I’ve observed and documented.
This work is made of found corrugated cardboard that I cut and coat with acrylic paint, patterned paper and other materials. Working from a rotating supply of leftover scraps and in-progress segments, I respond to each piece as it develops—one intended to be wall-hanging may end up a stand-alone sculpture; another begins tall and narrow and becomes short and wide. Colors shift, pieces expand or contract. Discarded cardboard exemplifies the waste of overproduction and our reliance on expedience, but as an art material it is regenerative. Giving it a new idiom, I intuitively create speculative, tactile micro-worlds that celebrate imperfection.
Links
Artist Talk: “Off-kilter” at the Garrison Art Center, 2023
Interview: Pierogi flat files, 2015