Something In The Air: The Paintings of Casey Weldon
Casey Weldon’s work is like the house of mirrors at a carnival. Instead of stretching and distorting the human patrons that stumble into the labyrinthine funhouse, though, Weldon’s work entraps American culture itself, reflecting images that amplify, twist, and invert the dynamics we otherwise inherently accept in our society and its rituals. His paintings feature beautiful women wearing headdresses adorned with bullets and cigarettes; gigantic humans dwarfing industrial surroundings rendered in toy-like miniature; and most famously, four-eyed cats that both attract and repulse, magic eye strains that at once reflect the euphoria and the withdrawal of meme-addled internet junkiedom.
For an artist just now entering his mid-thirties, Weldon, who grew up in southern California and trained at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, has an astonishingly diverse and virtually bottomless output, from ’80s pop culture tributes to portraits of beautiful, saucer-eyed women betraying glints of secret transgressions. The one common thread between so many of his paintings, however, is a compulsion to create playfully satirical or outright critical reproductions of a reality we might otherwise accept at face value. But as it turns out, that mordant edge wasn’t always there. One of the most formative forces behind Weldon’s work is nostalgia. “Nostalgia is a hard feeling to describe,” explains Weldon. “I feel it when I see something I haven’t thought about in a long time and it makes me happy and sad at the same time. I’ve been obsessed with trying to interpret and express that feeling.” There are the more overt expressions of nostalgia in pieces like “AT-AT the Playground” and “Revenge of the Ross” featuring, respectively, Star Wars iconography and Joy of Painting TV show host Bob Ross (whose very cultural existence was largely predicated on nostalgia while he was on the air, and who could throw a manic eight-year-old into wistfulness for simpler times). But as Weldon himself attests, “it has become pretty difficult to refer to something that hasn’t already been remembered by another medium out there.” Nostalgia, especially the explicit, easily accessible variety, is a cultural commodity, and thus suffers the same oversaturation of all other cultural commodities in a densely commercialized, internet-diffuse America.
Nostalgia is a hard feeling to describe… I’ve been obsessed with trying to interpret and express that feeling.”
Fortunately for Weldon, so much of his work rises far above the province of memes and visual puns, evoking in the viewer a forlorn yearning more unconscious and faint than the collective memory of slam-bang cultural phenomena. Consider “Lazy Daze.” Twins in cherry-embossed tank tops and jean shorts sit with legs folded, holding a miniature Lazy Daze RV. Their gigantic figures dominate the frame, but the faded magenta forest, languid and narcotic in its misty pink haze of trees and fog, seems to hold sway over them. In Weldon’s hands the RV is a precious totem for a tech-free Arcadia of road trips and camping and unselfconscious forays into nature. The pretty, plaintive girls are both objects of nostalgia and themselves mourners, cradling the RV like a beloved memento of a time and lifestyle irretrievably lost. Works like “Suburban Terror” and “Coney Island” take a similar tack, reminding us that nostalgia is felt most powerfully when it is an elusive, attenuated sensation, recalling feelings we forgot we ever had.
The ability to conjure memories with evocative charm and an anthropological affection for moribund rituals looms large in Weldon’s work. But it’s far from his sole raison d’être as an artist. Cultural critique is another important dimension of his pieces, and, like the whimsical but malevolent mirror funhouse, his wry commentaries often unveil a heretofore unknown strangeness and deformity in its subjects. Pieces like “Pony Show” and “When They Come, We Will Make Them Our Pets” depict human beings as oblivious slavers, subjugating whatever they come into contact with for their own stimulation and amusement. “When They Come” is especially effective at this darkly comic satire: a girl in a sundress is holding a pitchfork-wielding goblin by a chain, suggesting that no matter what befalls our species, we’ll probably conquer and exploit it for superficial gratification and remain blissfully ignorant to darker implications. For Weldon, it’s possible that the internet has played a major role in these newer, shallower selves. “I fall into some internet black hole every day, and it’s fascinating how quickly an audience can remember, fall in love with, and then be totally over
something.” His Meow Brow exhibition at the Spoke Art gallery in San Francisco last September was an acerbic but oddly captivating commentary on Internet culture and the felines it has showered with its fickle adulation. Weldon’s pieces feature quadruple-eyed Oriental, Persian, and Manx cats in vibrantly rendered domestic backgrounds, with mesmerizing alien stares that call to mind Nietzsche’s line about gazing into the abyss.
he complementary pieces “At First Sight” and “At Second Sight” are stylish, resplendent standouts. “At First Sight” features a gorgeous but disheveled, even feral girl with hungry hazel eyes holding a tiger cub in her mouth. The magenta, pink and teal palette is a Weldon signature, and gives the piece a splashy, candy-colored allure. “At Second Sight” reverses roles, sticking a limp helpless girl in the grinning maw of a freakish azure-eyed tiger. At the bottom of the crimson background are what appear to be the bamboo walls of a zoo exhibit, suggesting another dimension to the trippy power dynamics between people and their pleasure objects. Is “At Second Sight” a loose metaphorical image for the insidious, brain-frying consequences of our internet- and media-driven obsessions? Or is it more boldly a psychedelic revenge fantasy for the exotic animals we have enslaved and objectified, at the zoo or through digital ephemera? Whatever the interpretation, Weldon proves a master at mixing heady, aesthetically pleasing palettes with complex, ambiguous themes. As he puts it, he likes using “pretty colors… to try and convey darker, melancholic emotions.” One could argue that such juxtapositions are the aim of the best pop surrealists: they draw you in with the bizarre and spellbinding, only to gut-punch you with a scathing, jaded attitude toward their gorgeously rendered subjects.
The characters I make are affected by their appearance and how they’re treated…”
One of Weldon’s latest exhibitions, Subnatural, represents something of a departure for the self-proclaimed “shameless fan of punchlines and puns.” As he explains, the works are “more figurative and quiet” and feature “predominately women set in pretty and natural landscape environments.” The pieces definitely have a portrait-style quiescence to them, with female subjects holding poses varying from the sensual and enigmatic to the wounded and protective. Naturally, though, Weldon couldn’t keep to the strictly representational, and he imbues the paintings with “just a little something off kilter.” In the case of “Boucherie,” that something is a pair
of dreamcatcher earrings with meat carcasses hanging from the intricate webs. In Native American culture, dreamcatchers are traditionally decorated with sacred objects, and Weldon slyly substitutes feathers for corpses to suggest the sacred customs of a drastically different American culture. Surface beauty and concealed cruelty are woven together in “Boucherie,” with the burlesque earrings serving as fetish objects for the custom and rituals (French for butcher’s shop, boucherie is also a Cajun term for an animal-slaughtering party) so ingrained in American lifestyle as to be imperceptible. But other pieces, like “Shadow Play” and “Slight of Hand,” are less symbolic, given instead to a smooth opacity that delights in a sense of contemplative, idyllic lingering.
In “Slight of Hand” in particular, the titular pun is just an entry point into a haunting, subversive, and darkly ravishing study. The young brunette, ensconced in an enveloping pink bowery, grasps the skeleton hand as if to consider the merits of death. It calls to mind Paul Delvaux’s “The Sleeping Venus,” the surrealist masterpiece that mixed sex, death, and paganism with the urgent incoherence of dreams, creating a nightmarish fantasy that was defiantly indecipherable. While “Slight of Hand” is more focused and far less Freudian, those shadow-hands groping and smothering the subject bring a level of fraught complexity that suggests a whole new direction for the one-time master of pop nostalgia. After all, the pretty colors and dark themes have always been there, but certain pieces in Subnatural suggest they have found deeper, more nuanced terrain, where Weldon’s ubiquitous beauties are beset by cultural and psychological menace, both of their own making and rising out of the deceptive environments they inhabit. Their vulnerability is also his own: “It definitely helps to use pretty people and funny jokes as a shield, but little by little I think I am lowering those defenses and hopefully evolving into someone that can be taken more seriously. That being said, I think I’ll always love a bad pun.”*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 32, which is sold out. Get our latest issue of Hi-Fructose with a new print subscription here!
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