Artists work to interpret and share topics and ideas that inspire them. It is said that “you paint what you know”, and this is certainly true for the majority of artists, painters or otherwise. How an artist works to look at, understand and “know” a chosen subject is a particular experience unique to each person.
Northeast Ohio artist Amy Casey finds inspiration in the places she has lived, including Cleveland, her home for 20 years.
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“For some time I have been working on an evolving series of cityscapes that reflect my view of the world as a changing and difficult construct,” notes Casey. “Using real buildings and landscape elements like blocks, I construct and rebuild my own cities in painstaking, meditative detail, tinkering with them to try and make sense of the world. … While I hope for the best, my paintings often express my anxiety for society and our world.
“Continued Continuing: Paintings by Amy Casey,” on view at the Canton Museum of Art through October 30, is an intimate look at the artist’s work. Featuring primarily large-scale acrylic paintings on paper, this exhibition captures and holds your attention through whimsical yet poignant narrative paintings. Although open to interpretation, each work tells a particular story that is incredibly detailed and very familiar.
“Grigging” is a 2008 acrylic on paper that features a mass of houses tied together with rope to a larger warehouse and the base of a factory structure. Houses float like a bunch of balloons on a white background. As you would expect with a mass of houseboats, the ropes that hold them together bend and seem to swing.
The artist has created houses that seem to move away from the central parts of the composition at a faster rate than the rest of the structures shown, while some move more slowly. This creates an obvious tension in the work and helps give a sense of movement and even a vertigo quality to the painting.
“City Wall” is a 2009 work that features structures and parts of a city stacked or stacked on top of each other. Different types of walls that were constructed with different materials weave their way through the divergent buildings of the city up and down the “stack”. Long, slender stick- or stilt-shaped elements are used extensively throughout the composition and appear to support different structures as required. The silt elements help emphasize the precarious nature of the buildings and tell a story while creating a visceral and emotional response.
“Everything Is Fine” is an acrylic on paper painting from 2022 that highlights new directions in Casey’s paintings. Here the artist has used his familiar buildings, but instead of showing them active and alive, these structures are defunct or dead and piled up in mounds like a mountain landscape that dominates the background of the pictorial plain.
In the middle of the lot, the buildings feature familiar details and colors, but for the most part they are still abandoned. In the foreground, tree stumps on which mushrooms grow. There are even new shoots of trees and plants.
This work does not have the feeling of a direct commentary. However, this seems to tell us that even though things may decay, fall or collapse, there is always a possibility that something could develop despite the circumstances.
Importantly, this exhibition was born out of the Canton Museum of Art’s participation in the CAN Triennale. The museum reviewed the work featured in the 2018 Triennale and offered Casey a show that was originally scheduled to take place in 2020, but was delayed until this year due to the pandemic.
“When we saw Amy Casey’s work, we knew she would be a perfect fit for our museum,” note the exhibit’s curators. “Amy’s work has a unique voice; it’s like a part of Amy has been infused into every piece she creates. A story emerges from each building, house and vineyard, and leads you to reflect on its meaning. The Canton Museum of Art is pleased to share Amy Casey’s work with its community and support a local artist.
Of course, Casey is represented by galleries in New York and Chicago and has reached far beyond northeast Ohio with her work. Still, it’s wonderful to see the museum showcasing regional talent as it always has and supporting the CAN Triennale.
Anderson Turner is Director of Collections and Galleries at Kent State University School of Art. Contact him at haturner3@gmail.com.
Details
Exposure: “Continued Continuing: Paintings by Amy Casey” through October 30
Square: Canton Museum of Art, 1001 Market Ave. N., Guangzhou
Hours: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday to Thursday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday
Cost: $8 for adults; $6 for seniors, students and veterans; free for museum members and children 12 and under. Free admission every Thursday and the first Friday of each month
More information: 330-453-7666 or https://www.cantonart.org/
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