2020
Amy Casey
I was born in 1976 in Erie, Pennsylvania, the first half (baby a.) of a surprise set of twins. My childhood memories consist mainly of hanging out with trees and reading library books but my twin Beth (baby b.) assures me that other events did happen. My middle school counselor pushed me into art classes probably because I was waffling without direction and possibly because he wanted to get to lunch early. My chance encounter with his longing for a PBJ eventually led me to the local school for performing and visual arts with two great mentors, Mary Pat Haven and Kenneth Kopin. They encouraged me to love and pursue art. From there I ended up in glorious Cleveland where I got my BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. After a short stint in Chicago with a pirate, I settled in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland. It is now a good bit less grimy than it was when I first arrived. My neighborhood has definitely infiltrated my work and you can see bits of it in my paintings. Most all the buildings I paint are real buildings, though sometimes altered, and many of them are from Cleveland, since I live here. I paint full time now and also do some printmaking at Zygote Press where I have a second little studio. Over the years I have been fortunate enough to receive four Ohio Arts Council Individual Awards, A Creative Impact Fund Award, The Cleveland Arts Prize, a grant from CPAC's Creative Workforce Fellowship program, The Paul and Norma Tikkanen 1st place painting prize, a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico and a summer residency at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA via the Ohio Arts Council.
I am currently represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago.
Statement
As checking in with the news has been filling my heart with a ceaseless existential shriek, my main body of work has been parsing my experience by exploring communities gone past the brink- exploding, drowning, burning, floating away. Envisioning towns in worse-case scenarios serves as an acknowledgment and a hope that there is still time to change; it isn't that bad yet. This is not soothing work. Finding personal solace in nature walks has inspired a separate path of work - a series of small intimate detailed paintings, in which buildings have escaped from my larger paintings- spun off and landed in a strange forest to begin again. We have all experienced our own versions of the world turning upside down and trying to find our footing and start over while feeling small, alone, and overwhelmed by unsettling change. These paintings meditate on these feelings and what it's like to be alive in this overwhelming time and place. Though sometimes charming, these are not gnome or fairy houses in a magical forest. They are the surviving remnants of a world on the precipice, but they are -like nature, and hopefully like us -nothing if not resilient.
My work contemplates the interesting times in which we live- climate change and change in general, and our ability to adapt to that or not. In real life, change is often slow and easily ignored; in my work, I can move things along much faster. I hope that in looking at my work, people consider the role of community and our need for each other in difficult times. Will we advance as bootstrapping individuals or with mutual aid? I dream that my work both gives people a space to acknowledge uncomfortable feelings about world events and also to think about how things could be different, or that it's not too late to change. If history holds a series of catastrophes, then it must also have a series of recoveries. Perhaps the less explod-y parts of my work offer some hope that life continues on, maybe not the way we planned, but continues nonetheless. If people see bits of their own experience in my paintings and they feel less alone, then to me, I have succeeded.