The Source, Below The Rim.

The Source, Below The Rim is a series of 36 tintypes that systematically consider our planets star the sun and our sense of place within that celestial context. Originally produced as a modular grid of unique  8”x10” tintypes. For the Artist book version of this project Caswell has selected a sequences of images from the instillation and tintype originals allowing for details in the images and chemistry to create a contemplative and abstract reflection on the natural world - one experienced daily but not visible with our naked eye. 

For the past decade Caswell has been living and working nomadically throughout the United States of America, exploring man’s ability to subsist and create within our contemporary environment. While traversing the country Caswell created this series of images along the Rio Grande Gorge in the high desert of the South Western United States. The river gorge and its surround landscape offered a surreal backdrop with ample sky for Caswell to explore our planets star the Sun for the project. This remote environment full of canyons, cliffs, and aired vast spaces adds an eerie vacant feel to the works as the place reveled under the hanging sun is often once void of human structs and intrusions on the land 

As an artist, Caswell skillfully conducts experiments that aim to explore space as a complex negotiation of subjectivity and landscape. His fascination with the flexible application of wet plate collodion reveals captivating aspects of the contemporary world, igniting innovative approaches to the traditional tintype technique. By exploiting the tintype in contemporary ways, Caswell negotiates and reflects upon the reciprocal relationship of subjectivity and geography, delving into how space is experienced and mapped both externally and internally.

The Source, Below The Rim utilizes visual experimentation to offer profound reflections on our contemporary understanding of being in a place. Through these experimental works, the images transcend the boundaries of visibility, capturing abstract and detailed depictions of the sun amidst subtle silhouettes of trees and ridge lines firmly grounding the compositions in the essence of nature. The interplay between the sun’s rays, clouds, and atmosphere, combined with the unique aberrations in the wet plate emulsion, creates an abstracted view of the qualities experienced within these mesmerizing landscapes. These imperfections in the emulsion and the visual build up of chemistry on the edges of the works suggest fractures or deterioration of the natural world. The works also evoke a sense of introspection as they play with the idea of looking into the sun, allowing viewers to contemplate the source of light that shapes our existence.

11 x 9 inches