Casey Gray

Wandering through the internet a few days or weeks ago, I happened upon Casey Gray. Initially, what caught my eye was his use of color–vibrant, expert, and in-your-face–but upon closer examination, and after having made my way through his website and portfolio, I found that there was a great deal more to Gray's work than color alone. Coupled with nearly flawless technique of aerosol enamels, acrylics, and glitter (!), is an imagery that belies its banality. Plants and post-its, sunglasses and children's blocks, shoelaces and construction paper, create works that are fully-formed, self-aware, and historically referential in a manner that skips over the derivative and into the masterful. I am captivated by both Gray's subject matter and his media.

Casey Gray, DNT WAY ME DWN, 2016 | Aerosol acrylic on panel, 39.5 x 31 inches

Casey Gray, Bang the Drum, 2016 | Aerosol acrylic, liquid acrylic, aerosol glitter, and ink on panel, 30 x 24 inches

Casey Gray, Still Life with Flowers No. 35, 2017 | Aerosol acrylic, aerosol enamel, aerosol glitter, acrylic, and ink on panel, 19.5 x 15.5 inches

Casey Gray, Trompe l'Oeil with Double XO, 2015 | Aerosol acrylic on panel, 36 x 30 inches

*all imagery courtesy of the artist, check out Casey Gray's site HERE

Desolation Row

Once upon a time, a cabin-full of girls set out on their first overnight camping trip. They were 11 and 12 and 13 years old, and crazed, and silly, and nervous, and a little wild. They hiked through the backwoods of Wisconsin, pausing to eat bagged lunches, take pee breaks, and dawdle. The day grew long, and the sun hot, the girls grew tired as their packs began weigh on them. With supplies and morale dwindling, a compass and a topographical map for guidance, they realized they were hopelessly and irredeemably lost. Apprehension prickled at the backs of their necks–perhaps they'd been wandering in circles, perhaps they were no longer in Wisconsin, perhaps they'd gotten lost before they'd ever really gotten started. Finally, out of the haze kicked up by their boots a clearing appeared beside which lay a blessed lake. Whooping and screaming with joy the girls threw off their packs and began to make camp, practicing their newly acquired outdoor skills. Some girls set to pitching tents, others to gathering water, while the final few began to lay out kindling and firewood for their campfire. Carefully constructing the Teepee wood-lay out of the abundance of dry woods and grasses around them they had forgotten their earlier trepidation, shucking it off with their backpacks. As the match was lit, a breeze began to blow, lifting the hair up off of their sweaty necks, and breathing vitality back into the ragged group. The breeze breathed vitality into the small and winking flame of the match, which in turn gave life to the campfire that would steal life from acres upon acres of forest surrounding it. Several moments passed, and several more–the girls could never know that the land they had decided to camp on was privately owned, they could never know that the forest they camped in was in the midst of one of its driest periods in 30 years, they could never know that they had mislaid their Teepee until they knew. The fire burst free from its bounds. It devoured the grasses and woods the girls had laid too large. The fire devoured, as if it could never be sated, the ground at the girls' feet, a tent, several backpacks, the clearing, and finally, 36-odd acres of protected Wisconsin forest. The girls tried to fight the fire; they tried to bring water from the lake, they tried to dump sand to suffocate it, one ran miles up the road to find a phone, they took sleeping bags, and tarps, and even the shirts they wore to the fire in a furious attempt to beat it back until it was clear there was nothing to do but stand back and gape in abject horror as the fire they had birthed consumed everything it touched. Some could not endure the sight and fell to their knees. Most cried. A few turned away and into the embraces offered up to each other. One–I–did not. I did not cry. I did not scream. I stood, trembling and soot-stained with my burned through t-shirt in my hands, and watched. 

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Roxy Paine, Oscillation (Replicant), 2010 | Photograph by Jeremy Liebman / James Cohan Gallery © Roxy Paine, courtesy of Whitehot Magazine

Although we were cleared of any culpability, after all, we were just children, left neglected and unattended by our chaperones, we were forced to return to the burn site twice more. While embers still smoldered, we were made to stand and look upon the destruction we had so carelessly wrought. I grieved for what seemed to me a nearly limitless loss.

I thought the feeling, in the nearly twenty intervening years, was a memory. One rarely revisited, and rarely contemplated. When I walked into Paul Kasmin Gallery on 10th avenue in Chelsea, and into Roxy Paine's Farewell Transmission I found myself a trembling, 12 year-old again. Divided into three separate spaces were three separate scenes, the most poignant of which was entitled Desolation Row (2017). In the vein of table-top architectural models and grade-school dioramas, Paine presented a scene of complete and utter decimation that resonated deeply within my 12 year-old's heart. Spread over 13' lay a forest, burned out and devoid of any trace of life.

Roxy Paine, Oscillation, 2010, detail

I was familiar with Paine's work, having interned at a gallery that hosted an exhibition of his some years back, where a swirling vortex of his "replicants" of mushrooms had been installed on a wall. As a lowly intern I was tasked with the privilege of sitting at reception, fielding questions from gallery goers, and, more often than not, castigating those who touched the uncannily life-like mushrooms sprouting from the wall. Paine is an enormously skilled craftsman, with the ability to transform inorganic materials into organic forms realistic enough to fool even the most astute observer. Indeed, I could hardly believe the mushrooms were made of polymers and paint until I held one in the palm of my hand. 

Roxy Paine's skill at recreating the natural world around us is the reason that Desolation Row delivered such a visceral blow to me as I entered the room in which it was displayed. I felt again, profoundly, the grief of having had a hand in similar, albeit real, destruction. Even though, weirdly, there was no smoke, no scent of char, nor any real consequence like those we had faced as campers. Glowing orange diodes strategically placed in felled trees gave the impression that the coals could be fanned and the fire could flare again at any moment. They frightened me. Paine's heartbreaking commentary on the perpetual struggle between man and nature, and man's drive to conquer the unconquerable left me breathless.

To the one who started it all. . .

As a girl I was given a set of books about artists, really just abbreviated histories and overviews of their oeuvres. Represented in my collection were Rene Magritte, Vincent Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, and Pablo Picasso; the sole female artist among them was Frida Kahlo. Being the precocious child I was, it was not lost on me that she was the only woman among men. It was not lost on me that she had been headstrong and stubborn, competitive and jealous, fierce and loyal, that she was Mexican. This book, and consequently, Frida introduced me to the entire world of painting, to art as a whole. Later, her story would both devastate me and inspire me; Frida gave me license to dream about and to realize worlds that existed beyond the absolute. She gave shape to the figments that floated through my head. Although I would come to learn that I had no real talent for painting, indeed for most artistic endeavors, I never lost my admiration for a woman who fought not only for her life but also for her life's sustenance, her art. I will never forget the image her lover, Alejandro Gomez Arias, planted in my brain of Frida, nude, bleeding, and covered in gold after a 1925 trolly accident that prompted her turn as a painter.

"Someone in the bus, probably a housepainter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida."

So, today, on what would have been her 110th birthday, I wanted to take a moment to thank Frida. For the pain she suffered that engendered such a brilliantly beautiful and haunting body of work. For the way she took my breath away when, at my very first job at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, I was asked to hold La Venadita (1946) for the preparator who needed a spare hand. For the way it felt, like embracing an old friend, when I made my way to the front of the pack of gawkers at her exhibition held a few summers back at New York's Botanical Garden. For the delight I continue to take in her portrait, Autorretrato con Mono (1938), and the baby monkey who was her companion. For her bravery, her misery, her beauty, her love, and her life.

Happy birthday, Frida! You don't look a day over 25!

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world . . .

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve. 
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
 

"Dirge Without Music"
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY