James Casebere

The artist James Casebere is known for his architecturally-based photographs, for which he came to prominence for in the 1980s, emerging with other artists of the “Pictures Generation" such as Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Longo. Casebere designs and constructs artificial installations of buildings and spaces, which he then photographs and blows up into large-scale prints. These uncanny images—always devoid of human presence—range from depictions of American suburbia to landmarks from around the globe.

In the late 1990s, Casebere began flooding his surreal scenes, reimagining inteiror spaces such as rooms in Thomas Jefferson's Virgina estate Monticello and prison cells under several feet of water. One striking example is based upon Casebere’s 2000 commission by the design magazine Metropolis to document an actual maximum-security prison in Texas, Wichita Falls, which the artist later reconstructed in his own materials and photographed.

Casebere's work has been exhibited in significant group shows such as the 1985 and 2010 Whitney Biennials, and in solo shows at institutions including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal.