DAVID GIBSON WRITING

  I first met Janice Caswell around 1994 through a mutual friend who has since left New York. I was still generally unaffiliated at that time, a non-artist in the art world with critical aspirations. Having grown up around art dealers in Soho, I was just then beginning to visit studios, and hers was among the very first art that I was seeing where it was being made, and not just where it was commercially exhibited. What I saw reflected a personal reality in which parts and details really mattered. To me, it was about intimacy. Caswell was making artworks that resembled maps. She was clearly interested in describing the mutable character of periodic experience as viewed on a grand scale, and found its most successful manner of expression in a format that begged to be reproduced and reinterpreted. These were placed directly upon a wall, later to be contained in boxes covered in glass. What most attracted me to Caswell's work back then was how it combined order with ambiguity. Unl