Cole Caswell's Projects

MFA Alumni

Major: Photography

Graduation Year: 2008

Artist Statement:

Deserted American Dreaming:

A red tail hawk circles overhead, rush hour traffic screams, we pass a shrine to a lost traveler. Hidden makeshift homes amongst litter in the bushes leave clues from someone or something – but it’s all just dust as if a giant dirt bomb of our cultural debris was blasted in the face of nature – exploding discarded artifacts across the land. A hillside lays bare, our river trickles by, the sun raises to noon and becomes unbearable. We sweat. These visions of our deserted American dream come in and out of reality, taking us on a voyage into an incidental and magnetic landscape of our American frontier – a place now speckled with patches of wilderness and relics of the not-too-distant past. Combined they become temples for the future. Shrines for the imagination - teasing us to the edge of survival.

Biography:

Cole Caswell researches the remnants and patterns in our landscape that reflect contemporary strategies of survival. Through strata of observation, technology, subjectivity, and his surroundings, Caswell investigates geography and its impact on our perceived ability to survive. He uses traditional, historic and digital photographic media—including tintypes, environmental data sets, and augmented sampling procedures—to investigate our present condition. Cole received an interdisciplinary M.F.A. from the Maine College of Art, and has been working, living and traveling throughout the county in a nomadic format. At the present he is exploring ones ability to subsist within our contemporary environment, while furthering his inquirers into emergent and experimental photographic processes, perspectives, and applications. His studio is located on Peaks Island off the coast of Maine.