- courtesy amycasepaintings.com and metmuseum.org
Call it trendy or call it the zeitgeist or just call it like it is, chaos. The apocalypse seems to be on everyones mind and canvas’s these days and with one look at Amy Casey’s obsessively detailed paintings you realize we’re not in Kansas, oh I mean Cleveland, any more. House’s and infrastructure literally hang in the balance, wavering on broken wooden stilts or swinging from the one thing that keep us connected, phone, cable and electric wires, after the non-figurative bottom falls out.
Ms. Casey describes her paintings being born of an apocalyptic reoccurring dream in which the world around her falls apart. It seems that the panic of everyday natural disaster and war news can not help but populate the American psyche with feelings of doom and inevitability. Gone are the patriotic days of Leave it to Beaver where pride and national righteousness were a way of life. We are seeing in life and in art the ultimate fruits of modernism. Ms. Casey eschews post modernism’s ironic counter point to modernism with a purer descriptive form of reply. It’s as though she is saying, look dude, this is where we are, let’s not fuck around, everything is falling apart and I need to make pictures of it.
When one looks at Ms. Casey’s paintings it is easy to see the reference to the great rust belt architecture of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The colors are spot on. I can even swear to know some of the houses and old corner stores that are depicted in the rubble and destruction. It is the architecture or Walker Evans, and Charles Sheeler to name a few. And one painting in particular, Clouds 2008, seems to be a direct referendum on Sheeler’s Ford Plant, River Rouge, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, 1927. In Clouds, the once heroic un-named factory that employed many and was the life force to a modern economy now hangs upside down sputtering through production waiting for the last electric wire to snap sending the backbone of prosperity into the depths below. It’s clear that Casey loves her surroundings and the urban landscape that she lives by her meticulous rendering of the structures but it is of stark contrast to Sheeler’s love or interest in the modern world. Hope and awe has made way to shock and awe. This once modern architecture of production and prosperity stand crutched and limp much like the patients in a triage after a long and brutal battle. Geriatric structures holding on only by the past in which they have lived and of notions of strength and nobility that only exist now in history.
Amy Casey is working artist here in Cleveland. She studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art and at the Yale Summer School program. Her extensive body of work can be viewed on her website, www.amycaseypainting.com and at the Zg Gallery in Chicago. I just recently saw her work at the Spaces Anniversary show and it was fantastic. Enjoy!
~Art
hello my name is ART 