bio
Janice Caswell lives and works in New York City. She has had 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 Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Marlborough Chelsea, ArtPace (San Antonio), the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Galerie Anne Barault (Paris). In 2017 Janice 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, the 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”
This work begins with observation of structures in the manmade landscape, in particular those that surprise and perplex me, that are peculiar, awkward, or incongruous. Wandering through a city or town, my eyes are drawn to seemingly unremarkable details: haphazardly patched roofs, mismatched sidewalk tiles, makeshift construction site barriers, the outline of a former doorway long plastered over. The thousands of such visual references I have encountered and documented serve as inspiration for my 2D and 3D cardboard constructions. My working process is intuitive and improvisational: I allow the form to take shape organically, with each added scrap building on those already in place and suggesting where the form might go next. The unpredictability of this process results in pieces that often surprise me as much as the curious structures I come across in the world.
q&a on painted photographs series: Pierogi flat files