Casey Weldon’s work is like the house of mirrors at a carnival. Instead of stretching and distorting the human patrons that stumble into the labyrinthine funhouse, though, Weldon’s work entraps American culture itself, reflecting images that amplify, twist, and invert the dynamics we otherwise inherently accept in our society and its rituals. His paintings feature beautiful women wearing headdresses adorned with bullets and cigarettes; gigantic humans dwarfing industrial surroundings rendered in toy-like miniature; and most famously, four-eyed cats that both attract and repulse, magic eye strains that at once reflect the euphoria and the withdrawal of meme-addled internet junkiedom.
For an artist just now entering his mid-thirties, Weldon, who grew up in southern California and trained at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, has an astonishingly diverse and virtually bottomless output, from ’80s pop culture tributes to portraits of beautiful, saucer-eyed women betraying glints of secret transgressions. The one common thread between so many of his paintings, however, is a compulsion to create playfully satirical or outright critical reproductions of a reality we might otherwise accept at face value. But as it turns out, that mordant edge wasn’t always there. One of the most formative forces behind Weldon’s work is nostalgia. “Nostalgia is a hard feeling to describe,” explains Weldon. “I feel it when I see something I haven’t thought about in a long time and it makes me happy and sad at the same time. I’ve been obsessed with trying to interpret and express that feeling.” There are the more overt expressions of nostalgia in pieces like “AT-AT the Playground” and “Revenge of the Ross” featuring, respectively, Star Wars iconography and Joy of Painting TV show host Bob Ross (whose very cultural existence was largely predicated on nostalgia while he was on the air, and who could throw a manic eight-year-old into wistfulness for simpler times). But as Weldon himself attests, “it has become pretty difficult to refer to something that hasn’t already been remembered by another medium out there.” Nostalgia, especially the explicit, easily accessible variety, is a cultural commodity, and thus suffers the same oversaturation of all other cultural commodities in a densely commercialized, internet-diffuse America.
Nostalgia is a hard feeling to describe… I’ve been obsessed with trying to interpret and express that feeling.”
Fortunately for Weldon, so much of his work rises far above the province of memes and visual puns, evoking in the viewer a forlorn yearning more unconscious and faint than the collective memory of slam-bang cultural phenomena. Consider “Lazy Daze.” Twins in cherry-embossed tank tops and jean shorts sit with legs folded, holding a miniature Lazy Daze RV. Their gigantic figures dominate the frame, but the faded magenta forest, languid and narcotic in its misty pink haze of trees and fog, seems to hold sway over them. In Weldon’s hands the RV is a precious totem for a tech-free Arcadia of road trips and camping and unselfconscious forays into nature. The pretty, plaintive girls are both objects of nostalgia and themselves mourners, cradling the RV like a beloved memento of a time and lifestyle irretrievably lost. Works like “Suburban Terror” and “Coney Island” take a similar tack, reminding us that nostalgia is felt most powerfully when it is an elusive, attenuated sensation, recalling feelings we forgot we ever had.