Art: Surreal urban landscapes full of strange narratives from Amy Casey

There’s a narrative running through all of Amy Casey’s work that you’d almost definitely miss if you we’re only giving it a passing glance. The Cleveland-based artist creates huge, sprawling canvasses full of impossible, gravity-defying structures, bound together with ropes and propped up on stilts. Each one references a building that exists in the real world, and Amy compulsively collects photographs of American structures to incorporate into her paintings. As a result she likes to think that there are people living within her pieces, and the narrative of each series is dependent upon their needs.

Amy’s earlier work didn’t look like this; it was more a resemblance of the world we actually inhabit. But then she started painting giant plants into her suburban scenes that began to take over the landscape. To escape the malicious organic threat, Amy put the houses in her paintings up on stilts. When the stilts began to break because of overloading, she suspended the houses from hammocks and lashed them to each other with ropes to ensure their security. Now they’re all bound together in large bunches, amorphous strips and nuclear clusters – all to protect those imaginary inhabitants. You really can’t help but admire such an absurd process or the remarkable results it produces.