This winter, The Bascom welcomes sculptor and educator Casey Schachner as the 2026 Winter Resident Artist. An Associate Professor of Art at Georgia Southern University, Schachner will develop a new site-specific installation for the Thompson Gallery through The Bascom’s Winter Resident Artist Program, known as W.R.A.P. Her exhibition, on view January 24 through May 2, invites audiences to consider themes of place, identity, and material experience.
Artist statement on the Exhibition
This exhibition explores the timeless fascination with ships in a bottle, a nostalgic maritime object. Historically, ships in bottles occupy an interesting space between labor, leisure, and myth—once associated with sailors and meticulous craft traditions, they later became mass-produced souvenirs symbolizing maritime adventure safely contained. In their bottled form, ships represent a once-dangerous voyage reduced to an object of display. My practice is rooted in the investigation of identity and place, informed by my upbringing in coastal southeastern cities. Central to my practice is an interrogation of the tourist experience—specifically the materiality and meaning of commodified souvenir objects that symbolize these coastal identities.
In my winter residency I wanted to explore specifically the medium of inflatables, an artistic medium that emerged in contemporary art in postwar experimentation. My experience in sculpture materials and processes is rooted in more traditional practices like stone carving, glass casting, and metalworking. Pushing myself out of my comfort zone, to make something soft and squishy felt uncomfortable but also exciting. The Bascom winter residency provided this window of time to experiment.
This work presents inflatable, site-specific sculptures inspired by marine objects—enlarging these familiar icons to a larger than life scale. Humor and absurdity become critical tools, undermining both the authority of maritime history and also the permanence of the materials these objects are typically associated with - glass, wood, copper, steel, or bronze. The soft, buoyant forms point to both while echoing the visual language of tourism and novelty. Titled Ships We Keep, the exhibition reflects on preservation and memory—the histories and coastal identities we choose to hold onto.
