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Amy Casey
Amy Casey’s new paintings are eerily devoid of humans and animals, but her 23 acrylics on paper and panel contain numerous signs of life. The artist began this series in 2007, inspired both by the economy and by apocalyptic dreams she’d had for a decade. The self-aware houses, small commercial buildings and factories she paints escape catastrophe by lashing themselves together with cables, hoisting themselves on stilts and stacking themselves atop each other. Their anthropomorphism is most obvious in Incoming (2009), in which the cable connecting a house to its unseen support snaps. As the helpless dwelling falls toward the ground, its contours warped to suggest the speed of its descent, two houses on stilts watch, their postures improbably conveying concern.
Casey’s masterful balance of realism and fantasy is what makes her paintings so charming and original. Though the Pennsylvania native lives and works in Cleveland, her buildings are the same late-19th- and early-20th-century structures found in Chicago. The colors of their exteriors—subdued blues and greens, dark red, salmon, myriad shades of brown—are pitch-perfect. In the best pieces, Casey renders tiny bricks and panes of glass with the precise detail of Persian miniatures.
The work falters when the artist discards such precision for obvious brushstrokes that blur her buildings and rubble, but given the size of “Uncertain Times,” Casey approaches her theme with an impressive variety of compositions and styles. In real life, we never feel so much affection toward artificial siding.
