April 4 – 30, 2013
“The Sentence Camera” by Casebeer
5 years of obsessively documenting dialog, 128 days of photographs
The Sentence Camera project is about an artist’s love of language and her obsession with everyday conversations, what she calls urban dialog. Casebeer clearly expresses her passion for the meaningful coincidence of unrelated phrases. This is evident as she remarkably weaves together personal dialog and documentary photography.
Case writes about this projects inception as an accident
“It began at a party in an art studio my friend and I had painted into a life-size, vintage, Fisher Price house. Everyone there was wearing helmets. It was another curious landscape in life, and I had decided to shut up for once and write down selected sentences overheard from the gathering. My idea was to take these “snapshots” of the language of that night.”
This was the beginning of her five year obsession with documenting dialog.
Casebeer is an artist whose creativity has no bounds. Whether she is painting, writing, or in this case making a “sentence camera” her process of creation starts by her observations of human interaction and continues with the physicality of transferring what she hears with a Sharpie on her arm. As these groups of words begin to layer on her skin then the otherwise unrelated phrases become meaningful in relationship to one another. These sentences are transferred to notebooks and typewritten pieces on visual images and lead to 128 days of documenting with a photograph yielding modern prose “written” by the world at large.
“P.S. I feel naked and unhinged when my arm is sentence-less.” Casebeer
