There's still life left in the Dead Horse
By Charles Cassady
happenings
Published Oct. 6, 2004

A year ago, shortly after marking the third anniversary of the downtown Lakewood art gallery, curator-founder Kim Schoel announced the venue's days were drawing to a close. Yet since then the Dead Horse Gallery has mounted a retrospective on local artist Douglas Max Utter and sponsored shows at away locations, such as the Avon Lake Public Library.

This Friday evening, the night-of-the-living Dead Horse continues. The exhibit space has an opening reception party from 6 to 10 p.m. for what Shoel promises is the gallery's next-to-last exhibit: "Creeping Through," an exhibit of recent paintings by Amy Casey.

Her ouvre, mostly in acrylic paint on paper, often depicts urban environments of factory smokestacks, working-class bars, tire tracks and row houses, but with whimsical animal figures in place of human inhabitants. The pieces have a strong sense of location, and Casey often paints these fantasy scapes from memories of seeing them flash by in commuter-train windows, imparting a particularly dreamy quality.

Casey, 28, was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. After studying art in her hometown and at the Yale Summer School of Art and Music in Norfolk, Conn., she earned a bachelors at the Cleveland Institute of Art, graduating in 1999. Now a Cleveland resident (after a year in Chicago), she has been exhibited in Wisconsin, Illinois and at the Cleveland Biennial at Cleveland State University.

She also has another professional tie to the world of fine art. "I worked as a security guard at the Cleveland Museum of Art for three years, and then I moved to Chicago and worked briefly at the Oriental Institute Museum. I finished up my art-guarding career with a year at The Terra Museum of American Art, also in Chicago."

An artist working museum security is not uncommon, said Casey -- she knows several currently on duty at CMA. Apart from ministering to the occasional ill visitor (once the layout of the Terra Museum induced severe dizziness in a vertigo-afflicted woman), Casey's routine usually meant lengthy contemplation time immersed in paintings, sculptures and installations. She totals her tour-of-duty as equalling 178 days, solid, of standing in art galleries. A creative feast? Or an overdose?

"Somedays one, somedays the other...Occasionally, you see something new or intriguing in a piece you've stared at (sometimes literally) for hours, and that can be very inspiring. When you have so much time with the art, your ideas and appreciation for it begins to change. You practically build a relationship with some of it.

"Things which you might have hated looking at in a two-hour museum trip, you can grow to love standing with for days, or months, or years. So I found being in museums as an employee began to challenge some of my tastes and interests, and introduced me to whole new genres of art.

"Other times it's just tiring, long, difficult days, and when you get home, all you want to do is sit down or take a nap and not look at any more art for the rest of the day. You also have to be very self-entertaining to stand all day alone in the same room or rooms, no matter how great the art. It can be easy to burn out on your own thoughts."

Casey said that she now works as a gallery assistant, preparing and installing artwork -- not in a museum.

The Dead Horse gave Amy Casey her first solo show, in November, 2002. While critics have commented on ephemeral and transitory elements her environmental studies, Casey said that the exhibit space's mortality was not on her mind while she did her new paintings, "but I'm sure it will be on everyone's mind when they are in the gallery."

She said visitors should perhaps keep this thought: "If they support their local galleries and artists, they would see a lot less local galleries closing."

Paintings by Amy Casey at the Dead Horse Gallery are on view from Oct. 8 through 30. When it ends the Dead Horse will ride once more, with another Douglas Max Utter show.