Friday, October 17th to Thursday, November 13th, 2008
Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project Third Friday Art Downtown in October 2008, featured new work by three emerging woman painters Amy Casey, Amy Kligman, and Minerva Ortiz.
Parallax features the work of three emerging painters based in the Midwest: Amy Casey (Cleveland, OH), Amy Kligman (Kansas City, MO) and Minerva Ortiz (Lawrence, KS.) Sharing a sense of melancholic whimsy and quiet strangeness, their artworks weave together aspects of fantasy and reality, alluding to distance between private imagination and public realm.
The exhibition featured framed works on paper and paintings on canvas.
For photos of the event, check out our flickr.
About the Artists
For a number of years, Cleveland-based painter Amy Casey has been “experiencing a sporadically recurring dream about the end of the world.” Although not attempting to recreate this dream in her work, her paintings reflect a view of a nervous state of world affairs. Inspired by “natural and unnatural disasters, personal fiascos and the never-ending stream of bad news from the media,” the world depicted in her paintings has been (often literally) turned upside-down: the ground has crumbled and the sky is falling. Within these up-ended spheres, Casey explores ideas of anxiety and vulnerability, community and illusions of safety.
Concerned with the urban landscape, her paintings suggest resilience in the wake of disaster; a cobbling together of something new out of what remains. Casey earned her BFA from Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999. Represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago, she has completed an artist in residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Zygote Press. In 2007, Casey was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.
Amy Kligman’s paintings often appear as cautionary tales told to children, with archetypes and characters similar to those of the fairy tales and myths that inform early ideas of good and evil. Yet while often maintaining a storybook sense of sweetness and delight, her works reinvigorate this childhood vocabulary to posit a more conflicted and nuanced landscape of behaviors, interactions, and ideas. A recent transplant from Cleveland now based in Kansas City, Kligman has presented solo exhibitions at Genuine Imitation Gallery in Portland, OR; 1300 Gallery in Cleveland, OH; and Primary Space Gallery in Detroit, MI; and in group exhibitions at spaces including Kansas City Artists Coalition, Kansas City; About Glamour Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Kelley Randall Gallery, Tremont, OH; and Limbo Fine Arts; San Diego, CA. She earned her BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2001.
Minerva Ortiz earned her BA in studio art from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005 and is currently pursuing her MFA in Painting at the University of Kansas. Whether depicting her family, animals, landscapes or architecture, Ortiz paints situations that combine abstraction and realism to emphasize the complex nature of the events and subjects represented. Recent works allude to connections between humans and animal behavior as they reference the expression of needs, territorial battles, and social hierarchies, while also functioning as anthropological studies of politics.
Aware of her own immigrant and “hybrid” status, Ortiz attempts to present “both sides of the situation at the same time” in these moody works where tenderness toward her subjects mingles with a dark sense of the foreboding. Ortiz has presented solo exhibitions at the University of Kansas and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
