Everything Is Fine!, 28″ x 35 1/2″
Humanity is dangling on a precipice of catastrophe. Global warming, overpopulation and food crises, war, terrorism, and political positions that have never seemed more distant. The Doomsday clock is 100 seconds to midnight.
But the Doomsday clock has never been farther than seventeen minutes from midnight, and we have always been navigating our self-created disasters. In the last hundred years alone, we have experienced a world war; the terrorist destruction of New York’s Twin Towers; nuclear disasters at Chernobyl and Fukishima; the Bhopal Gas Leak; and oil spills from the Exxon Valdez to the Deepwater Horizon. There have also been countless local calamities like Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969—which contributed to Congress establishing the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and America’s first Earth Day the same year.
In 2022, Cleveland-based artist Amy Casey’s solo exhibition at Chicago’s Zg Gallery, titled Teeter Totter in Hotter Water, is full of paintings that capture our current crises. Her detailed acrylic paintings, which run the gamut from 6×6 to 40×60 inches, are chock-full of exploding buildings, houses falling into the sea, teetering towers that barely stand up, and constructions reclaimed by nature. Though the buildings are painted from actual architecture, they are devoid of inhabitants (aside from an occasional cat if you look closely enough)—occupying environments that one could easily assume are post-apocalyptic.
Simmer, 8″ x 8″
Stumble, 16″ x 16″
But, significantly, Casey also captures our sense of hope. Not hope in the big-picture sense of “we will fix all our problems!” but in the small-picture sense of “ok we are still alive so there’s that.” Her houses in landscapes of stumps and mushrooms can feel like charming tiny homes waiting for gnomes to come home to as much as they do scenes from the end of the world. One could imagine the exploding tower of buildings in “Simmer” and the destroyed floating houses in “Flotsam and Jetsam” eventually settling into the comfortable nooks of the giant-tree-stump dwellings of “Embedded” and “Everything is Fine!” (Are the houses in paintings like “Some Enchanted Evening” tiny on regular-sized stumps or regular-sized on giant stumps?)
Flotsam and Jetsam, 28″ x 35 1/2″
Nestled In, 28″ x 35 1/2″
Casey, like Paul Noble in his Nobson series, Tacita Dean in the Russian Ending series, or Chris Van Allsburg’s pictures in the Mysteries of Harris Burdick, is sending postcards capturing moments from a larger world somewhere out there—a world much like our own, but just different enough to make us stop and pay extra attention. The viewer feels that the abandoned(?) island in “Mossy Plush” exists across the water from the buildings spilling into the ocean in “Barge” and in the same world as the towering flora in “Juliet.”
The universe Casey has created is universal and referential at the same time. We might imagine one relationship between the two houses in the “Juliet” landscape, but the title brings us back to Shakespearean balconies. And the house in the forest depicted in “Some Enchanted Evening” is an unmistakable reference to the Broadway song from “South Pacific” about encountering a stranger—in this case, a stranger on a moss-covered tree stump surrounded by fireflies. It is an image that traces a clear path back to fairy and folk tales where an ambiguous home amongst the trees is full of mystery and danger—but holds out the possibility of a happy ending after encountering magic men in a house in the woods.
Juliet 16″ x 16″
Some Enchanted Evening, 16″ x 16″
The wonderful thing about postcards is that it allows the viewer to focus in on a scene of interest, cutting away the larger picture frame. Casey’s paintings do just that—you can rest in a hapless or hopeful moment as befits your mood, and the tremendous craft in Casey’s work allows the viewer to completely submerse themselves in those moments. Casey embraces detail without the burden of photorealism and as a result her paintings become welcoming, immersive experiences… so much so that the viewer might be taken aback in a painting like “Churn” when, after just getting comfortable in the adorable buildings with a seaside view, you remember that they’re on fire AND sinking into the ocean.
Amy Casey speaks to our time and our place in the world as Americans in her paintings. She captures our ability to read disastrous world news and then settle in for the evening at a nice restaurant, to watch television with takeout, or to cook a meal-kit delivery. Amy Casey is a painter for our historical moment. She doesn’t shy away from the issues of our time, but she knows her audience is too educated and sophisticated for the didacticism of environmental or political art. Moreover, she asserts that in the midst of things falling down all around us, we still have to find instances where “Everything is Fine.”
Churn, 28″ x 35 1/2″
Mossy Plush, 28″ x 35 1/2″
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