Hospital

1997
Not on view
Since the mid-1970s Casebere has been photographing tabletop models that he constructs out plaster, Styrofoam, and cardboard. While his earlier images highlighted the flimsy, house-of-cards aspect of his creations, his photographs of the 1990s hover more ambiguously between the real and the imagined. The deserted, white-washed spaces he fabricates-prisons, schools, courtrooms, underground tunnels, corridors, and sewers-seem uncannily familiar and often call to mind unsettling associations with discipline, circulation, and control. Stripped of incidental detail, this dramatically lit view of hospital beds has a generic institutional quality that is also strangely haunting, like a half-remembered dream.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Hospital
  • Artist: James Casebere (American, born 1953)
  • Date: 1997
  • Medium: Silver dye bleach print
  • Dimensions: 121.9 x 152.4cm (48 x 60in.)
    Frame: 141 × 171.5 cm (55 1/2 × 67 1/2 in.)
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: Gift of Neil C.S. Hirsch, 2001
  • Object Number: 2001.225
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

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