The buildings in Amy Casey's paintings are staggering on stilts, flying on cords, and tangled in electric wires. But as preposterous as the scenes sound, Casey's meticulous eye for detail from the faded signs of businesses on empty warehouses, to the water towers on the roofs, to the angle of a wood-shingled bungalow's gutters will resonate with most Clevelanders, some of whom will stop and wonder, where have I seen that building before?
Amy Casey: So, as you can see, this is sort of typical house-lined street, squished together houses. Inspiring when you are painting a clump of buildings together.
The images of houses and buildings in this growing body of work are all authentic. Casey walks down a Cleveland street pointing out which of her neighbors' houses have made cameos in her art. The 33-year-old doesn't drive and gets a lot of inspiration from her commutes on foot or public transportation. There's all the buildings in midtown she passes on her way to work at the Cleveland Institute of Art or on her walks through the Flats to get into downtown. And there are also the houses right across the street from one of her favorite haunts, Tremont's Lucky's Cafe.
Mhari Saito: So that's a house that you paint?
Amy Casey: Yes. I've painted that a lot of times. It looks vulnerable. It looks sort of like a sheep that's wandered too far away (laughs)
View the Applause profile of Amy Casey
The houses in Casey's paintings are characters in an ongoing story inspired, she says, by a recurring nightmare. She started painting houses in 2006 to protect their inhabitants from huge, choking alien-like plants. Casey moved the houses up on to stilts. The stilts collapsed. The plants disappeared, replaced by growing piles of demolished houses. She attached her houses to ropes. Ropes broke. Couches and toys spilled out through broken floorboards. Clumps of houses sit in mid-air tangled, yet temporarily rescued, in telephone wire.
Amy Casey: In the web-like paintings where they are interconnected, if one house should fall out then it would drag the a lot of them with it which if you look at some of these neighborhoods where houses are getting boarded up and how that's affecting the other houses...I think there's parallels.
Casey's imaginative art certainly wasn't intended to profit on the misery of others, but in a way it has gotten her a lot of notice. Her work has been featured in "The New York Times" Forum section about the housing crisis and on the cover of several arts magazines, books and CDs. Casey says she was more influenced by scenes going on around her, rather than directly intending to make an artistic comment about the housing industry's collapse.
Amy Casey: I did know a know of people who were losing their houses to foreclosure or the threat of foreclosure...trying to sell it really fast before the bank closed... so that was definitely part of the mish mosh of events that makes up your thoughts.
Cleveland's "Scene" magazine calls Casey the most talked about Cleveland artist of her generation. She's just won a highly-competitive grant from Cuyahoga County, paid for by the tobacco tax. Her newest work is on display now at Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art.
Megan Lykins Reich: We are in the Peter B. Lewis Gallery where Amy Casey's work is on view.
Associate Curator Megan Lykins Reich approached Casey a year and a half ago when MOCA started planning this exhibition titled: "There Goes the Neighborhood." But Reich says Casey's work has evolved since then, becoming less dark though still precarious. Reich stands in front of Casey's newest work called "Waiting Place." Industrial buildings perch on stilts. Rubble and spiky, broken stilts fill the background.
Megan Lykins Reich: This piece, "Waiting Place," the title obviously indicates this moment where we are waiting to see what happens. Where we are sort of talking and postulating, and giving ideas of what we can do in the future to make these neighborhoods strong again. But we haven't actually taken that next step.
Casey is now back in the studio, hard at work on her next exhibitions scheduled in Chicago and San Francisco. She painstakingly paints hundreds of tiny bricks into a long swathe of a wall that covers her page.
Amy Casey: I think about how people obviously need a community, but at the same time it seems like no one ever wants to work together. So sometimes I'm more interested in how things come together and other times I'm interested in how that falls apart.
Casey receives the prestigious Cleveland Arts Prize tonight.