busywork: Ginny Casey

 

Cob is pleased to present two solo exhibitions split across the gallery space – both exhibitions are the UK debut solo exhibitions for each artist. 

 

These exhibitions continue Cob’s dual exhibition programme. Curated across the split level of the gallery, each exhibition is to be experienced individually and in dialogue with one another; the work suspended, in ‘conversation’. 

 

The upper level of the gallery will display Busywork an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Ginny Casey. The lower level of the gallery will display Bruised, a new painting cycle for German artist Fabian Treiber.

 

Both Casey and Treiber’s work play with that which is recognisable and empty it of its familiarity, forcing the viewer to reconceptualise our relationship to these items and spaces. Taken together, their work reflects and refracts a similar preoccupation with specificity and absence and creates a shimmering dialogue categorised by surreal voids.

 

Both Casey & Treiber can be compared in their respective psychoanalytical approach to the domestic space and the objects contained within.

 

 

Ginny Casey’s contemporary, surrealist paintings capture invented spaces that are occupied by objects distorted and rendered uncanny: tools, household items, and the occasional disembodied hand. In her richly coloured still lives, inanimate objects appear alive and suggest psychological or dream states. 

 

An MFA graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Casey has exhibited widely in New York City and beyond. The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania hosted a critically acclaimed exhibition of her paintings in 2017. While they focus on casually assembled everyday objects, Casey’s canvases pull viewers in with suggestive narratives and spatial depth. Her works can also be playful and self-referential, with clusters of scissors, vessels, palette knives, and other studio necessities that appear in conversation.  

 

Busywork features a new suite of oil-on-canvas works that sees Casey returning to an anthropomorphising of tools and hardware.  Casey continues to be “humoured” by the simplicity of painting inanimate objects as animate sculptural forms: mops, scissors, pliers and saws forgo their usual identity and are symbolically contorted into visual metaphor.

 

For Casey the works in Busywork carry personal meaning,  inspired, as they are, by a David Byrne song, “Artists Only”, where the songwriter describes an artist needing to “clean” his brain by painting in solitude. Here, Casey likens the act of painting to any other type of busy-work, saying “there is a sort of futile productivity to it, a therapeutic-quality to making paintings. It is a salve for the unsettled, irritated brain, for a desire to be helpful to the world, and yet all that exists is cowardice and emotion, no real action. Instead, whether it is painting, cleaning or repairing, busy-work benefits the do-er with its therapeutic value.”

 

Casey’s exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition text written by curator and writer Elaine ML Tam.