Bio
Austin Caswell (b. Denver, CO 1996) is a sculptor and installation artist whose practice explores contemporary consumer culture, material metaphors, and speculative objects and scenarios. He’s been a fellow at Haystack Mountain School of Craft, the University of Arizona, and was a resident at the Lionel Rombach Gallery in Tucson, AZ. Caswell has exhibited across the United States in venues such as the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona, the Museum of Art- Fort Collins in Colorado, and SFVACC in Encino, CA. He was studio assistant to artist Andrew Dufford in Denver, CO in 2017. Caswell also holds professional experience as a studio instructor, carpenter, landscape designer, and fabricator. Caswell received a BA in Integrated Visual Studies as well as a BA in History from Colorado State University and is currently pursuing an MFA in 3D and Extended Media at the University of Arizona.
Artist Statement
My work explores ways everyday objects can be transformed and recontextualized. Working through sculpture and installation, I focus on accumulating objects over time and the conversations and built up meaning that can emerge as arrangements form. I build series by using objects found in my local vicinity as origin points, unpacking an object’s multiplicity of meaning by blending ecological, technological, historical, and mystical connections. Through this process, my work poses philosophical questions surrounding humans’ role as caretakers as well as our need to find solutions for ourselves.
Informed by our current industrial model and inconspicuous practices such as identifying asteroids for mining or sending ghost ships adrift, my recent work explores themes of seeking, floating, and the detectable. Consumer objects, tools, and vulnerable non-human entities are replicated with materials that speak to matters of perception and properties of light. At the same time, modes of production and craft are equally considered as handmade and mass-produced objects intersect. Once combined, a body of work emerges that explores dealing with contradiction in desire and attention as poetics of consumption, visibility, and effort converge with my searching for silver-linings in possible alternatives.
Austin Caswell, Fall 2024.