bio
Janice Caswell lives and works in New York City. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Savannah College of Art and Design, Schroeder Romero (NY) and Matteawan Gallery in Beacon, NY. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions at museums and galleries, including the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Marlborough Chelsea, ArtPace (San Antonio), the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Galerie Anne Barrault (Paris). In 2017, Caswell was awarded an Arts and Letters award and a purchase prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been a fellow at Yaddo, La Maison Dora Maar and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been featured in several publications including Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information by Manuel Lima and The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, by Katharine Harmon.
about “constructions”
The experience of place lies at the heart of my art practice, which actually begins outside the studio. Walking through the manmade landscape, I’m drawn to curious structures and details: haphazardly patched roofs, the shadow cast by a broken shutter, mismatched sidewalk tiles, makeshift construction-site barriers, the outline of a former doorway, long plastered over. I photograph as I walk, capturing details like these as well as compelling image fragments: forms, angles, colors, patterns, textures, plays of light and shadow. The thousands of visual references I’ve encountered and photographed serve as inspiration for my cardboard constructions, but my working process itself is intuitive and improvisational. Starting with no particular form in mind, I combine scraps left over from previous works, allowing each newly added piece to build organically on those already in place. The unpredictability of this approach takes the work in unexpected and satisfying directions.
q&a on painted photographs series: Pierogi flat files