Barbara Kasten; 1986 - 1990

Tokyo, Santa Monica: RAM [Research of Art Media], 1991. Firs Edition [stated]. Limited to 3000 copies [stated]. Hardcover. Very good. Barbara Kasten (Photographer). Format is approximately 10.25 inches by 12.75 inches. Unpaginated. Decorative cover. Profusely illustrated in color. One two image fold-out and one tri-foldout Text is in English and Japanese. Minor wear. Signed and dated by the author on the title page. This includes essays by Deborah Irmas, Meg Perlman, Michele Druon. Barbara Kasten (born 1936) is an American artist. Kasten trained as a painter and textile artist at the University of Arizona and California College of Arts & Crafts, and a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship at the University of Fine Arts in Pozna with Magdalena Abakanowicz. She was influenced by the Bauhaus movement and L�szl� Moholy-Nagy. She turned to photography to encompass her interdisciplinary work, beginning in 1973 with the commercial process of diazotype and subjects reminiscent of performance art. Working for over 40 years, she is often inspired by the act of depicting a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane. She often uses mirrors, lights, and props for conceptually-based pieces. Her work has continued to pure abstraction. She has had many commissions and residencies, including a Capp Street Residency. She has influenced many photographers and artists and holds the position of Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago. She has won many awards, notably the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2015, Kasten was given the first career survey of her work, entitled "Barbara Kasten: Stages" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. It was presented in conjunction with the Chicago Architecture Biennial. This includes the essays: Architectural Sites: The Photographer as Lion Tamer by Deborah Irmas (12 numbered images in full color); Juxtapositions: The Jackson Pollock House by Meg Perlman (4 numbered full color images); and New Mexico Sites: The Other Inside: Allegorical Ruins in the Postmodern Scene by Michele Druon, Ph.D. (7 full color images). Includes at the end information on Awards, Selected Individual Exhibitions, Selected Group Exhibitions, Special Projects, Monographs, Selected Bibliography, and Selected Public Collections. Barbara Kasten is a contemporary American artist whose work investigates light and perception through photographs of elaborately constructed acrylic sculptures. Employing mirrors, colored-gels, stage lights, and translucent angled surfaces, the artist's sculptures transform through photography into gem-like abstractions. "For my earliest Constructs, made in the 1970s, I built life-size, trestle-like forms to work in tandem with mirrors. I designed and photographed these structures with the aim of upsetting normal conceptions of how perspective should work," she explained. "I considered the Constructs to be similar to stage sets, and my photographs of them look like impossible landscapes." Additionally, Contemporary photographer Barbara Kasten creates abstract interior environments where the interplay of assembled light, objects, and mirrors forms the illusory subject of her images. Kasten's education in sculpture and painting informs her work; both are mediums she feels are more dominant than photography, which only documents the assemblages that ultimately define her work. Using materials such as glass, mirrors, Plexiglas, and mesh, Kasten constructs large-scale sets that rely on shadow, light, and reflection to transform their interiors into abstract, geometric compositions. The result is a distorted sense of scale and perspective, and a sculptural quality likened to Constructivism. Kasten cites L�szl� Maholoy-Nagy, of early Modernist photography and the Bauhaus, along with James Turrrell and Robert Irwin of the Light and Space movement, as defining influences.