Zg Gallery opens their gallery season with a solo exhibition from Amy Casey, who paints highly detailed un-peopled, urban "landless landscapes" that reflect her concerns for the city's natural environment. The overarching theme of her meticulously painted cityscapes confronts perpetual cycles of boom and bust, blight and renewal, under-planning and over-development, and infrastructure decline vs. re-building. But now, even more troubling socio-economic, political, structural, and environmental issues course through her images in Lost at the Bottom of the World.
At first glance, it seems that Amy shifted attention from the city, past the suburbs and exurbs, to uninhabited forest and sea. Upon closer inspection, houses and buildings appear among outsized tree stumps or set adrift in the flood plains. Nature is reasserting itself in unpredictable ways.
Groundswell, acrylic on paper, framed, 36" x 48.25"
Amy explains, “Early in 2017, I found myself lost in a Finnish forest, confused after following a pleasing series of mossy rocks. With no sense of direction, no cell phone, no food or water and no understanding of the language, I felt the surge of adrenaline and panic that forms the basis of this exhibition. Though this event, which obviously wasn't life-threatening, I recognized the feeling as a representation of how I feel in the world right now; confused and not recognizing anything I thought I knew, with a low-level panic always just in reach and no idea of how to properly proceed in the world.
Overwhelm, acrylic on panel, 36" x 36"
"For the past 13 years, I've been working on an evolving series of cityscapes that reflects my view of the world as a changeable nervous construction. Using real elements of the landscape as sort of building blocks, I built and rebuilt cities in painstaking and almost meditative detail, tinkering with them as I try to make sense of the world. They eventually grew into their own ground, supporting each other. I guess it's hard for me to see that sense of community and growth right now. For better or worse, buildings are breaking free from the superstructures of previous paintings. In some paintings, those structures are literally crumbling. What do we do when the world seems to be falling apart?
Kapow, acrylic on panel, 12" x 12"
"In the strange and exhausting days we've experienced lately, I've been thinking a lot about uncertainty. In recent paintings, that uncertainty and the idea of feeling lost is a focus for me. A profound lost-ness that could be the unsettling experience of finding yourself in a world turning–or already turned–alien around you. Or, more optimistically, a lost-ness that could lead to a hopeful escape into a new world. These paintings reveal a desire to escape into nature, which unfortunately seems to be on shakier ground than ever, in a changing climate. A nature that, though still inviting, is both under threat from us and, also, threatening in return. The water is rising. The forest is cut down. But stumps, while dead, often create a home for new life of a different type – even if only mosses, fungus, and parasites. Perhaps it's a cause for hope. Life adapts and uses whatever resources are there to continue. I guess that's what we will do. Though I hope for the best, my paintings frequently express my anxiety for society and our world.”
Lost at the Bottom of the World is on view from September 6th through October 26, 2019.
