Casey Weldon crafts surreal, sometimes absurd paintings that play with the everyday and the otherworldly alike. The artist, based in Washington, D.C., is featured in a new show at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles. “Sentimental Deprivation” continues the thread of that duality in the artist’s work. The show starts June 3 and runs through June 24.
“Weldon gambols with the manipulation of scale and contrast to create otherworldly scenes, as though pulled from the cavities of the unconscious and its latent thread-like associations,” the gallery says. “The works alternate between moments of intense darkness and incandescent light, figuratively and literally. Saturated with lush color and detail, they are stylized by idiosyncratic palette choices that capture a range of brightness and atmosphere, from the intensity of neon to the lambent of dusk and the recesses of twilight obscurity.”
The artist cites Giorgio de Chirico, Andre Breton, and other 20th century surrealists as inspirations. His work also takes current pop culture and other contemporary sensibilities into account. But the pursuit combines the surreal and the realistic renderings of the past. Other works take on something wholly different, using Weldon’s signature humor to add a different edge.
Anna Hoyle’s paintings of fake but humorous books are full of self-deprecation and universal absurdities (like the plight of depending on an IKEA pencil). One of our favorite details on her gouache paintings are the price stickers, which can carry their own jokes on each piece.