JACOB CAUDILL / AT LARGE AUTEUR
Multidisciplinary Artist — Fort Wayne, Indiana
“I believe beauty is the highest achievement of visual art, but I don't understand beauty as prettiness. Beauty is visual greatness. I often find interior meaning to be the most beautiful thing an artwork can contain, something powerful that can only pass from artist to viewer through the visual experience itself. I use spectacle, scale, color, movement and optical illusion as a lens for attention, not as an endpoint. They draw the viewer toward work designed to reward prolonged looking and reveal more of itself through continued encounter.
I believe visual art is a language in its own right. A look can communicate something that becomes diminished when translated into a sentence; painting can do the same. If everything important about an image survives its translation into words, then the visual experience has become redundant. I'm interested in what remains irreducibly visual: relationships of form, color, texture, space, movement and perception that can be experienced but never completely contained by paraphrase.
My paintings therefore move away from conventional symbolism and increasingly from recognizable subjects altogether. Rather than placing surreal objects into familiar landscapes, I reauthor the landscape itself. I invent forms without direct equivalents in the physical world and construct environments around their own internal logic. Shape doesn't need to symbolize something else before it can speak. The relationships between forms become the language.
That process extends beyond painting. Sculpture allows me to reauthor physical space; projection allows me to contradict that physical space with apparent space; animation allows those relationships to develop through time; music gives those relationships another temporal and emotional dimension. The medium changes, but the problem remains the same: constructing perceptual realities that attract the viewer immediately and become richer the longer they inhabit them.
This is At Large Auteur: art that escapes containment. Art that grows the more it's seen. Infinitely scalable art that exists in the moment for the sake of itself.”
ARTIST STATEMENT
Press
Corey McMaken | The Journal GazetteLocal artist creates temporary projection mapping installation in downtown Fort Wayne | Local Arts | journalgazette.net
Oct 1, 2026
Visitors to the Abstract during Art This Way Fest today and Saturday will be able to experience a unique installation by Jacob Caudill.
The local artist this week combined hundreds of hand-cut pieces of pressed PVC board to create an anamorphic geometry wall that includes a 3-dimensional surface onto which he has mapped animated projections to create a temporary installation that will be on display through the month.
Additional art by Caudill, including projection work and surreal landscapes, will be shown inside the Abstract, 1126 Broadway.
Caudill is renting a 15,000-lumen projector for today and Saturday for the geometric wall installation, then switching to a 6,000-lument projector for the remainder of the month.
In projection mapping, an artist draws animated forms that are virtually anchored to precise points on surfaces such as Caudill’s geometric wall. The animation is projected onto the shape, creating illusions such as movement on a static surface.
Play Video
Jacob Caudill's anamorphic geometry wall will be on display outside The Abstract through October.
For this piece, Caudill has a three-hour loop of animations which will start around 7 p.m. as it gets dark outside. The artist says he likes the immersive nature of the wall piece because the scale allows a viewer to fill their field of vision with the installation.
“I play around with the shapes in a lot of different ways,” he says. “I can black it out and rotate the triangles in place, and it looks like it deconstructs.”
Some projection mapping artists don’t animate for a unique shape, or if they do, they don’t also build the surface, Caudill says. The outdoor piece at the Abstract is about 12 feet by 10 feet, but because he is constructing the modules himself, it can be scaled larger or smaller for future installations.
The artist says he doesn’t approach the animation, projection mapping and wall construction as separate works.
“I like to think of them as different elements carrying the same interior meaning forward to the audience,” Caudill says. “Each speaks its own language, and by using so many different mediums I can … bring together an idea that one medium couldn’t by itself.”
The interdisciplinary aspect excites him because he can continue to explore new mediums.
One of the pieces inside the Abstract is a collaboration with artist Lily Feno, who is curator for the restaurant. Caudill saw a portrait on fabric that Feno had created in her Broadway studio, and approached her about using it as the surface for one of his projections. His mapping creates movement across the face.
Caudill enjoys exploring work in a public environment. In a gallery, he says, people feel pressured to form an opinion or consume art in a certain way.
But outside, especially if someone’s not expecting it, art can catch a viewer with their guard down and really wow them.
A version of his geometry wall was previously displayed at Wunderkammer Co., and Caudill noticed people walking past it unless it caught their eye. But in a festival setting, people tend to linger with it. It’s stronger as public art, he says.
Caudill has seen the Broadway district develop in recent years, and says it’s a good feeling to experience how things are changing with the inclusion of public art. He has also seen the effects of public art on the Hamilton neighborhood where he lives northwest of downtown.
Public art uplifts the community, Caudill says. That’s why he’s willing to pay to build his wall and other pieces by hand and spend years creating a library of visuals to use in his projections.
“I think it has a profound effect,” Caudill says of public art. “It gives people the opportunity to think about something else, believe in something else and makes a big difference in my opinion.”
Jacob Caudill, working under the name At Large Auteur, is an American multidisciplinary artist based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, working across painting, sculpture, installation, animation, projection mapping, interactive media, music, and live performance. He has worked professionally as an artist for more than a decade, developing a practice that moves between traditional and emerging media.
Caudill’s work is rooted in surrealism and the construction of imagined environments. His paintings develop forms and landscapes largely from imagination, while his installation practice expands this visual language into physical space through sculpture, projected light, animation, sound, and interaction. His work often explores the tension between physical and apparent space, using spectacle and optical illusion to draw viewers into experiences that reward prolonged looking.
Recent projects include the Geometry Wall, a modular geometric relief sculpture that serves as an evolving surface for projection, painting, animation, and interactive media, and Prayers on Pavement, an immersive exhibition combining large-scale projection, interactive installations, painting, animation, and live performance synchronized to original music. His frame-by-frame painted animations further blur distinctions between painting and moving image, transforming physical paintings through time.
Working as At Large Auteur, Caudill approaches these disciplines as parts of a single authorial practice rather than separate mediums. Across them, he constructs perceptual realities through image, space, light, movement, and sound that moves beyond the boundaries of its original medium and becomes richer through continued encounter.
BIO
Art This Way Fest celebrates decade of public art programming in downtown Fort Wayne
Art This Way Fest celebrates decade of public art programming in downtown Fort Wayne | Local Arts | journalgazette.net
A decade after its start, Art This Way has become known for bringing colorful murals and sculpture installations to once-ignored alleys. downtown sidewalks and the city’s Urban Trail.
Director Alexandra Hall laughs when asked if she thought the Downtown Fort Wayne program would one day celebrate 10 years. It was difficult to imagine in the beginning how far Art This Way would go.
“It’s a privilege that I’ve had this opportunity to carve out this type of thing in Fort Wayne, and hopefully make a positive impact,” she says.
The program is marking its anniversary with Art This Way Fest today and Saturday featuring murals, music, fashion, dance and other creative endeavors on Broadway
An eye to the future
While an event of this scale is special for the 10th anniversary, Hall says organizers in the future might bring some version to other locations programmed by Downtown Fort Wayne such as Calhoun or Wells streets. This year they wanted to activate Broadway to welcome that corridor to the Downtown Fort Wayne zone.
The Broadway Arts District has been programming First Friday events, welcoming the public to the galleries, studios and other venues near Electric Works.
Art This Way Fest is going to bring many new people into the district, says local artist Lily Feno who has a studio on Broadway and is on the leadership team of the arts district.
Feno is also curator at the Abstract, a restaurant that she says has become a gathering space for artists and home for conversations about art. The venue is hosting a temporary outdoor projection mapping installation by Jacob Caudill in October. Feno believes it will become a destination piece for people to check out during the month.
“For him to have this piece that’s going to be something that is talked about in a place that has held a lot of those conversations,” Feno says, “Personally that represents a lot of what we’re trying to do here. I feel really excited about what’s happening in the district.”
WANE 15 — Television Feature & Live Demonstration | October 2026
At Large Auteur artist Jacob Caudill appeared on WANE 15 during Art This Way Fest in Fort Wayne, showcasing his outdoor Geometry Wall installation at The Abstract. The segment featured a live demonstration of his projection-mapping techniques, highlighting how custom animation transforms a three-dimensional sculpture made from repeating equilateral triangles into a moving, immersive artwork.
WBOI 89.1 NPR — Interview with Julia Meek | 2026
Interdisciplinary artist Jacob Caudill, known as At Large Auteur, joined Julia Meek on WBOI 89.1 to discuss his creative practice spanning painting, sculpture, animation, projection mapping, and music. The conversation explored his immersive installations, the development of his album Prayers on Pavement, and his approach to combining traditional fine art with emerging technology to create unified audiovisual experiences.
