Casey grew up in the small city of Erie, PA, along a creek and pocket of woods ideal for a child to hide in, read in, or hang out with friends and chipmunks. Spending time outdoors played a huge part in her creative development, which began to ripen more fully
in her teens. She confesses, “I was a dorky creative child with a compulsion to make things; and I grew up into a dorky creative adult who paints,” adding: “Painting gave me a fully satisfying outlet for my obsessive energy and, though it took me a while to figure it out, when I did, it gave me a kind of freedom.”
In 1994, Casey ventured to Cleveland (where she currently lives) for her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. She absorbed its urban qualities like a sponge, painting numerous arrays of precarious cityscapes over the years. Stacked buildings and houses teetering on stilts, hung from airborne nets, and/or woven together through cryptic networks of rope and wire—often set within the drab background of a pale sky. Yet luscious nature inevitably crept its way back to her mind. After attending some residencies in natural areas, including the Arteles cultural center in Finland (housed next to a magical forest of birch trees and mossy rocks), the city stuff took a backseat for a while. “These experiences rekindled my relationship with nature, and it became much more prominent in my work. Nature began to represent a kind of escape for me, especially from the political noise that gets increasingly louder every year.” Eventually, these two areas of life coalesced into the depictions we’ve come to witness in more recent years.
About five years ago, she started working on six-by-six-inch panels as an antidote to larger, more time-consuming paintings. Within these, lone houses and buildings nestle snugly upon stumps, surrounded by plumes of mushroom and other flora. “I’m in love with the varieties, forms, and textures of stumps. I enjoy their placement between death—the definitive end to one existence— and their alternate status as a platform for new life, whether that’s plants, fungus, creatures, or tiny house refugees doing their best in an unfamiliar strange place, where they are small and a bit overwhelmed by the world,” says Casey. We may wonder if she shrunk herself to achieve such hair-thin detail within such little spaces. But in reality, she uses the teeniest of brushes, hunching over for hours at the cost of an achy back and strained set of eyes.
Her epic, architectural disaster-themed paintings are given considerably more room to convey their monumental effects. “Dissolve Copy” (2024) shows a monstrous pillar erected from the ocean via an infinitude of individual buildings. We witness this leaning “entity” in the moment of collapse: its sides shattering and crumbling into the sea below. Perhaps humanity has been a little too ambitious in its attempt to carve out metropoles, failing to maintain the necessary balance of give and take. In this case, the throat of the ocean begrudgingly swallows the mess the clumsy humans have made.
In addition to remixing the environments around her, reading happens to be an important influence upon her work—a recent example being Italo Calvino’s Baron in the Trees, which influenced the direction of her recent painting “In the Trees.” “I was stuck on the painting—became blocked for almost two years and after reading that book things started moving again. A lot of people have asked me about Calvino’s Invisible Cities, especially in regard to my older work—and yes, I read it and loved it so much that I would have been intimidated to try to purposely recreate it in any way at the time. But just marinating in that world tickles out a way of looking at things, and instilled an awe of creative city and community structures that has definitely informed my work,” says Casey.
… I AM NOT A SCIENTIST; I DON’T HAVE ANSWERS–I AM MORE INTUITIVE AND EMOTIONAL THAN INTELLECTUAL. BUT I CAN PAINT, SO I PAINT.”