Casey Connelly: June 2024
Casey Connelly is a multidisciplinary artist from Pittsburgh who currently lives and works in Fayette County, PA. His work is an extended meditation on the absurd contradictions of contemporary existence. He has exhibited throughout the United States and taught studio arts at a number of schools, including the University of Pittsburgh.
My work channels the artificiality and simulation which typify contemporary life, as well as the attendant angst, paranoia, dissonance, and yearning. Images, representations, and symbols abound within impossibly flattened, yet deeply layered, picture planes, at various levels of replication or abstraction, floating, barely connected to their referents, and executed in a mode of hysterical realism. My process is post-craft, multifarious, and untethered; detergent-modified oil paints mingle precariously with acrylics and dozens of other polymer-based mediums and films, evincing qualities of both the digital and the analog. Brush-painted and matrix-printed imagery coexist in uneasy balance. Surfaces betray no impasto or texture of any kind, only a plasticky sheen. Retrofuturism and grotesque nostalgia inflect the compositions; temporally and visually, the images exist at the end of history: the ultimate non-time, non-place. I revel in the visual milieu of consumerism: colorful, atmospheric, narcotizing, reductive, and all-consuming. In this reality, everything, even inner experience and the transcendent, will be commodified and sold back to us as deliverance, as salvation.
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