Review: James Casebere: Landscape with Houses

In ‘Credit Faith and Trust’, James Casebere present us with hyper-real images of suburban idyll that, on closer inspection, are found to be acutely unpleasant and sinister. His work is a terrifying vision of a faux-utopia – an unsettlingly artificial world, replete with bubblegum rainbows, psychotically orange trees and sickening green grass, empty of human presence but peopled by homogenous identikit houses. Hyper-real it may be, but that this is a reflection of our own world cannot be doubted.

What is more, Casebere warns, this is a way of life that cannot be sustained. Created in response to the ‘mortgage crisis, and the madness of the way we live in the age of global warming and the end of oil’ – a time when, for a number of reasons, ‘the American Dream of home ownership has become a dangerous fantasy’ – Casebere threatens this world with flame, redemptive or otherwise. Many of these compositions contain ominous, sly fires, unattended or on the horizon, seemingly destined to spread and devour. In one frame this inevitable conclusion has been made explicit. Our world built on Credit, Faith, and Trust is not safe: it cannot, and will not, last.

[Review by Thomas Keane]