If the latest roller coaster at Cedar Point is a little too scary but you still want to upgrade your vertigo, try zooming in on yourself via Google Earth. It’ll leave you feeling like a bug in a teacup on a plate at the end of twirling stick. Or maybe like one of Amy Casey’s amorphous, appealingly non-human urban creatures occasionally seen in that artist’s latest paintings, tossed like arugula as their old neighborhoods are upended in paroxysms of sudden, violent change. Casey has painted increasingly profound visions of home and its insecurities since her 1999 graduation from the Cleveland Institute of Art. A few years ago her small and mid-size acrylic on canvas works typically stirred together and inverted interior and exterior views of a vividly intimate, tactile world. Wallpaper patterns became landscape elements, as an evolving cast of characters (in one work from 2001 they were little yellow chicks) re-enacted family stories, or later adult experiences. By degrees Casey’s painted world became a hostile, if beautiful, place, plagued by towering factories and overabundant, toxic plant life. Diminutive mutant families crouch in dismay in these works, like dust bowl-era Okies headed for the storm cellar, powerless to prevent a coming Apolcalypse. Then, apparently, It came. For the past year or two Casey’s downtown ‘scapes have turned almost literally upside-down. Roads tear loose from their guardrails, bucking high in the air as they rain down clods of earth and orange traffic barrels, while houses hang on to their foundations with the utmost difficulty, if at all. Mysteriously, much of this seismic activity shakes Casey’s neighborhood while it’s propped up on a makeshift trestle of stilts, as if somebody was somehow trying to practice desperate damage control. However that may be, a painting like Surrounded can come to no good end. Along the lower margin of that acrylic on paper work a jumble of houses is seen sinking into a morass of crazy, crab-claw plants. Above them a delicate blue bridge carries a section of blacktop to nowhere, while to the right two intact clapboard dwellings perch on a little toupé of turf, held precariously aloft by a cat’s cradle of skinny timbers. Looking more closely, we see a spiky, spunky little Casey critter gamely using its pseudopods (or whatever) to shoot baskets against the garage. Whether this is an act of bravura, or a case of denial, or both, is anybody’s guess. The infectious visual motion of Casey’s latest compositions pulls the viewer into a loop of imagery and texture that is at least as giddy as it is pessimistic, like a child’s game of snakes and ladders, but mixed with intimations of doomsday and a hefty dollop of plain old daily anxiety. Recent Yale graduate (MFA 2007) Breehan James has a different take on home and hearth. Her paintings and prints here are mostly studies for larger works (“which wouldn’t fit on the plane,” she explains), but even so stand on their own as semi-idyllic visions of a family time-warp. Several are oil and acrylic on canvas depictions of a cabin and its environs, where the James clan gathers. The place is Wisconsin and the time is, as she remarks, basically the 1960’s – “nothing has changed up there since then.” Her cabin view from lake is a lovely work that owes much to several American painters who have dealt with landscape and with modes of visual simplification. It brings to mind both the self-taught, post-impressionist influenced, deeply American landscapes of Fairfield Porter, and more recent mediations on suburban life by fellow Yale grad Jennifer Bartlett. Fresh and well- composed, it presents the swooping horizontal tangle of branches and vertical pattern of tree trunks that clothe a sojourn in the woods with great verve and spontaneity. The simple, clear-eyed nature of these works is celebratory in its appreciative response both to nature and to the qualities of the various paints that James employs. Each image seems like a conscious emblem of a place, or an event, or even a life-style, in the most resonant sense of that phrase -- a life conducted in a manner that expresses something of its personal history and essential being. They speak of a life (or part of a life) lived close to the land in a specifically American vein. James’ deer hunting shows a grassy clearing or park that flows up to a line of trees in the middle distance. The antlered body of a deer lies in the foreground just above the right hand corner of the canvas, pierced by arrows. James reports that one family member is a bow hunter, and this is simply a picture of that. Certainly the scene, while perhaps a little sad, is not sentimental. The fact of the dead animal is presented in the same visual tone as the other elements in the work. And although the deer is much nearer to us than are the trees, it is still small. We’re seeing it from some distance, then, but this painting also seems to be one in which James is headed toward a manner more obvious in other paintings and prints here, where she moves toward folk art references and sources. It’s a mode that it proceeds towards its subject intuitively rather than objectively, and therefore the smallness of the deer is likely to be a comment, as much as a visual fact: It’s either not important to the painter, or it represents a fact that the painter wishes to minimize. Questions like these, having to do with the conventions of depiction as they relate to the ordering of private experience, peek out from behind James’ deceptively simple images, making comments about the psychology of intimate places, about home and the events and habits that constitute a sense of belonging in the world. [Free Times 6/6/07] |
Amy Casey acrylic on paper 2007
| You Can't Go Home Again: Amy Casey and Breehan James @ Parish Hall |