Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Bewitched, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Ginny Casey that rupture the physical and psychic integrity of domestic spaces. Our third solo exhibition with the artist, Bewitched will be on view from January 14 – February 17, 2023.
Ginny Casey’s paintings each represent a surreal amalgam of animate and inanimate forms centered within the compositions like portraits. Emerging claustrophobically before haunting, enclosed architectures, they bend and swell with across the paintings’ surfaces. Items such as candles, tables, chairs, and glassware morph alongside insects, plants, and human limbs, bringing an unresolvable instability and eeriness to what might otherwise be cozy, domestic scenery.
Casey’s darkly luminous objects have either been electrified with life, or are organic forms that have life draining from them. For example: a chair in The Counselor grows hands and feet, while a group of four legs emerge from a drinking vessel in Drinking Game. Elsewhere in Planting Room and Under the Rug branches and leaves curl downward toward the ground melancholically. Life, in Bewitched, is always stuck in a state of liminality. Engorged vessels present throughout many of the paintings recall pregnant bodies, another kind of intermediary stage of life.
Bewitched marks a shift in Casey’s practice, now more unilaterally focused on the domestic sphere. Prior to 2021, Casey’s paintings conjured a world chiseled out of an invented artist’s studio and its constituent parts. Her compositions, furthermore, tended to depict stages in the construction or deconstruction of sculptural forms. In the new works, Casey grounds her paintings at home rather than at work, though the “home” is decidedly unhomely. The natural world is also now a more significant part of her compositions, though it, too, is out of joint.
Human activity has vacated all of Casey’s interiors. Barren rooms enclose viewers within their solid walls. Though sometimes the artist includes doorways and windows, these portals lead nowhere, reinforcing the confines of the pictorial space. The compositions take on a high-angle perspective that uses the horizontal line created by the intersection of wall and floor as a horizon indicating enclosure rather than vastness. A small bug in Raining Inside is the only figure that has entered Casey’s netherworld from the unknown outside. The moth crawls into the space from a slit in the wall that looks more like a partially drawn curtain, as though this space — like all of Casey’s rooms — were a stage hosting a theater of the eerie.
Ginny Casey (b.1981, Niskayuna, New York; lives and works in New York) received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Casey has had solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; Half Gallery, New York; and a two-person exhibition with Jessi Reaves at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. She has been included in recent group exhibitions at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles; Almine Rech, London; Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York; Almine Rech Gallery, New York; and Bravin Lee Programs, New York.