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 lived experience of place and impermanence lies at the heart of my art practice. Being repeatedly uprooted during my formative years made me a vigilant observer with an understanding that our connection to place is tenuous. Our current geopolitical instability further affirms this dynamic, the chaos seeping into our daily lives. As an artist, the impulse to concretize and encapsulate my surroundings has been a driving force in my studio process for 25 years, resulting in a body of work that starts with seeing and arrives at reinvention.
I am interested not in what is pristine or perfect, but in the haphazard allure of the makeshift and timeworn—the detritus of human endeavor. Photography is a form of pre-studio notetaking or cartography, establishing a connective archive of observation that informs my sculptural paintings. I first photograph architecture and various marginalia, collecting image fragments of angles, color, patterns, texture, and light on my daily walks through the ever-changing landscape. This approach to seeing is something I carry with me wherever I go. I inevitably notice the off-kilter construction-site barrier; a broken shutter; the faint outline of a former doorway, long plastered over. The invented architecture of my 2D and 3D constructions are an amalgam of thousands of such details I’ve observed and documented.
My preferred working material is cardboard—accessible, imperfect, and pliable. It is how I build my ongoing series called Constructions, painted sculptures (or sculptural paintings) made of found corrugated cardboard that I coat with acrylic and patterned papers. I cut up the cardboard and work from a rotating supply of leftover scraps and partially-constructed segments. I respond to each Construction as it develops—one intended to be wall-hanging might end up as a stand-alone sculpture; another begins tall and narrow, and becomes short and wide. Colors shift, works expand or contract. Discarded cardboard exemplifies the waste of overproduction and our reliance on expedience, but as an art material it is regenerative. By 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