Amy Casey's house series reminds me of Dorothy Gale's house (from The Wizard of Oz) which gets swept up in the tornado before landing in Oz. Which led me to think that maybe she grew up in a hurricane state...But after reading an article about her, I now understand that these paintings are a reflection of the current global housing crisis and her anxiety towards the state of the world; “natural and unnatural disasters, personal fiascos and the never-ending stream of bad news coming in from the media”.
Her houses balance on stings, stilts or are strewn as debris but they all play characters in her narrative, inspired by a reoccurring 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 - Megan Lykins Reich, curator
For me the earthy sepia-esque tones; her eye for detail and the playful compositions, depicting fragility of the way houses are built so close to each other, are what I like the most. I hope that I get to see her work exhibited soon.
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