Amy Casey's Precarious Worlds: Nature vs. Architecture in New Paintings

Amy Casey creates intricate paintings where manmade structures clash or coexist with natural environments, based on real-life reference material. She keeps thousands of photographs of buildings, stumps, fungi, and other nature elements, organized by building stories. Her work explores climate change anxiety, humanity's struggle with nature, and the tension between growth and destruction. Casey grew up in Erie, PA, earned her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1994, and now lives in Cleveland. Residencies at Arteles cultural center in Finland rekindled her nature focus. She recently completed small six-by-six-inch panels featuring lone houses on stumps surrounded by mushrooms. Her large painting "Dissolve Copy" (2024) depicts a collapsing tower of buildings into the ocean. Reading Italo Calvino's "Baron in the Trees" influenced her painting "In the Trees." Casey is finishing a 60x40-inch painting titled "Icebergs" for a November 2025 show at Zg Gallery in Chicago, showing underwater structures. She hopes viewers bring their own interpretations to her work.