Solitary spaces - photographs of architectural models; James Casebere; Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco, CA; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA

Pictorial illusion continues to intoxicate the late eye. Although we recognize that our day-to-day world of images is a conglomerate of fabrication, in practice we attend to hold this truth at bay -- particularly when overwhelmed by dint of the pleasures of looking. With its special ability to create a convincing semblance of deepness volume and texture, the photographic image single complicates the visual play of veracity and falsehood, reality and fiction. For above 20 years James Casebere has persistently engaged of that kind themes with his photographs of tabletop constructions. In his greatest in quantity recent series -- seen in last year's retrospective, "Model Culture" at the Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco and in a smaller review currently on view at the Williams community Museum of Art -- he reminds us that uncanny beauty and spatial illusion can yield a volatile combination.

Casebere's latest works make go round on the dichotomy of solitude and community. They call forth architectural typologies presently in decline or in crisis -- factory, house, prison, house of god and asylum -- each of which has left an indelible mark upon the topography of modern Western tillage Apse (1996), a large-scale (48-by-60-inch) monochromatic color print, is particularly noteworthy in this regard. The photograph lay opens up a sparse, barrel-vaulted compass suggesting the apse of an ancient cathedral. Its volumetric spaces are accentuated by dint of a diffuse white light that pierces through a gridded aperture from upon high. Horizontally and vertically, the flatness of the picture plane is rent up by the moldings conjoined to the surfaces of the wall. Bespeaking solitude and isolation, the image is a finished metaphor for inwardness or interiority.

And at the same time there remains something hauntingly oppressive and dire here as well. There are no discernible exits from one side which to escape this space. The interior appears to be cold and dank, and in some way suffused with an acrid odor of age. single might read the light from above as an allusion to Christ in majesty, whose heavenly court would have adorned this portion of the house of worship In reality, however, within the overhead window Casebere has re-created the grill of a sewer canal thereby recalling the kind of fetid underworld made familiar by means of Nadar's 19th-century photographs of the Parisian catacombs. In Casebere's photographs there is always a conflation of meanings. The malodorous chamber implodes with godlike energy; the underworld is played against the celestial, light against dark, the sacred against the profane. Casebere began photographing tabletop constructions in the mid-1970s, and first garnered attention for his work in the early '80 With the goal of extending the traditional uses of the camera, he reflection of photography in terms of its relationship to plastic art as well as its kinship to performance, animation and put design. Like several of his generational equals also working in photography -- Cindy Sherman, David Levinthal and Laurie Simmons -- he began by dint of seeking to confront the way that film, television and the advertising media have furnished what he calls our unconscious "visual library." Casebere owned an unshakable fascination with the American cultural landscape and its peculiar banalities. The tract place of abode with its middle-class trappings -- lawn equipment, home-movie camera, berth beds for the kids, television -- was of particular import as the artist sorted without his own postwar upbringing. "The first pictures I discharge ... were the result of thinking about the domicile as a place and what the different compartments in it embodied or signified," Casebere recalled in a 1993 interview. "So I began thinking in metes of epic stories that throw backed my own history.... Trying to deal with the big ideas in relation to my stupid, silly, suburban middle-class background."[1]

Notable for their cool hard-edge character, these first "model" photographs -- the series "Life Story Number One" (1978) and forsaken House With Cactus (1980) -- turn rounded out to be a bountiful proving earth of ideas. While lacking the technical sophistication of his later photographs -- indeed, the early works sometimes fail because they fall short of creating a seamless pictorial illusion -- these pictures allude to a burgeoning critique of Puritan convention. The rigid architectural forms depicted in these early photographs are metaphors for social conformations These images convey a faculty of perception of the constricting limits placed upon the individual: the external compressings to conform, to assimilate oneself to the social mass.

Shortly thereafter, Casebere began to dig into the broader implications of the dominance of institutions above our lives. With deliberate use of irony and satire, he revolveed his attention to the judicial a whole (Courtroom, 1979-80), commerce (Storefront, 1982) labor (Cotton Mill, 1983) the library (Library II, 1980) and the house of god (Pulpit, 1985). His more new series of images shake not upon the limitations of postmodernism's institutional critique and reveal that "Classical" form retains a strong viability. In this work it is evident that Casebere has opt to face the problems of subjectivity by means of means of a renewed estheticism. And his novel pictures suggest, too, a gradual go [i]or[/i] come back to more traditionally modernist goals for the photographic image. These include visual ambiguity; masterful, almost obsessive, superintendence over composition; careful articulation of light and space; and ironic juxtaposition.