The Brooklyn Rail

‘T’ Space in Rhinebeck has inaugurated its Archive Gallery with an exhibition of three new sculptures by James Casebere. The gallery, an extension of architect Steven Holl’s archive of architectural models, is a venue appropriate for Casebere, who has long based his work on building and photographing such models. But here, in both an extension and a departure from that practice, he’s enlarged the models themselves and brought them into the gallery. No longer making “pictures,” he’s stripped architectural forms down to their angular geometric structure. He sets the viewer in dialogue with abstracted improvisations based on actual buildings, generated in a playful intuitive process but finished with the same precise attention as his photographs.

As Casebere toggles between spectatorship and agency, he builds with modular forms that recall children’s blocks, celebrating an open-ended, improvisatory process of construction. He constructs his objects from burnt bamboo plywood, scorched with a blowtorch according to the Japanese practice of Shou Sugi Ban, which lends the show its title. Through burning, this sustainable process protects the wood, leaving the charred surfaces darkened and lightly textured. Their monochrome bears an inviting tactile appeal very different from that associated with minimalism. Enlarged and elaborated upon, the objects remain “models”—useful tools, open to free interpretation and social engagement, provisional sites of revision or extension.

Casebere recently showed photographs at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, featuring models of buildings staged on artificial water and bathed in lush, digitally enhanced reflections, but here his monochrome sculptures bask in natural light from artfully placed windows and skylights, actively participating in the gallery’s space. The play of light and shadows that animates their crisply articulated surfaces harks back to Casebere’s early black-and-white photographs, but these works draw on innovative, unconventional structures from Asia and Africa, by contemporary architects engaged with local environments and their climates. Essentially cubic in structure, Shou Sugi Ban #2 and #3 (both 2024) are densely packed, built of overlapping rectangular blocks with angular protrusions, recalling a staged photo of the Chulah Cookstove (2024) at Sean Kelly, inspired by Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari. Shou Sugi Ban #1 (2024), on the other hand, spreads horizontally on the floor: from the open, sphynx-like embrace of its “arms,” it rises and subsides through an inventive succession of variations on architect Akihisa Hirata’s Overlap House (2018) in Tokyo.

Inspired by poetry, dreams, and symbols, Casebere ranges widely over time and space. In 2019, he’d undertaken an ambitious expansion of his work in Rome, incorporating ancient and Renaissance buildings, when Covid curtailed his stay. Returning to the Hudson Valley, he designed and installed an eccentric outdoor structure of his own at PS21 in Chatham: a dynamic, futuristic space, set on an angle as though dropped from the sky, Casebere’s Solo Pavilion for Two or Three (2021) features a circular aperture based on the oculus of Rome’s Pantheon, an archetype of universality. Its open structure, inspired by the openness of Roman street life, promotes dialogues between inside and out but also evokes Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76) in the Utah desert.

If the self-enclosure of the new objects sets them in dramatic contrast to Pavilion, the gallery itself provides a site of interaction, where, as though to compensate for the loss of the photos’ pictorial context, Casebere celebrates the three-dimensional fullness of the enlarged models—self-sufficient and accessible from all sides. Shou Sugi Ban #2 and #3 drift peacefully like icebergs on the polished floor of the gallery; at close to human scale, they recall us to the bodily reference implicit in any fully realized sculptural form. Casebere acknowledges the influence of sculptor/architect Tony Smith, and the dramatic setting of these self-enclosed objects in light-filled space evokes the epiphany of Smith’s minimal Black Box (1962), as well as earlier modern sculptures, like the interlocking geometry of Constantin Brancusi’s The Kiss (1916). Given Casebere’s concern with prison architecture and the pandemic isolation he himself endured while conceiving these works, the isolated objects suggest self-reference, but Casebere cultivates ambiguity: if there’s poignancy to their self-enclosure, they also populate the space, and their substantial presence, at human scale, establishes social interaction with the viewer.

Shou Sugi Ban #1 evokes the frozen shards of Caspar David Friedrich’s Sea of Ice (1823–24), a painting Casebere recreated photographically in 2014, anticipating his environmental concerns. The shifting planes of the sculpture’s multifaceted landscape generate abstract light structures: as with the colored reflections on flooded buildings, Casebere cultivates beauty in the destructive forces he confronts. His move towards abstraction might be compared to Piet Mondrian’s, who stripped his paintings of anecdotal incidents to create tool kits of fundamental elements and opened intuitive pathways for future construction. Casebere’s universalizing, postmodernist vision of urban and natural landscapes encompasses world cultures past and future, and his own evolving design process provides the ultimate model.