Mighty Casey

John Casey makes art using a lot of manly flowers. We love "Flower Fight," for example, a drawing which shows a guy's face sprouting blooms out the eyballs. He's a dude, so you can't really tell how he feels about it, but his fingers are sort of fluttering underneath his chin. We take that to mean that although the situation seems unusual to him, it warrants an unusual set of innocent hand gestures, not fury or agony. The piece is absolutely beautiful, in any case -- poetic and absurd and pleasingly grim. Casey's humanoid figures are often like that, brilliantly rendered with delicate lines and subtle colors as their bodies completely betray them. Extra limbs, bulbous carbuncles, and dark patches appear where they don't belong, but for some reason it's all as beautiful as a well-worn pair of trusty work boots. Casey joins many many other talented artists at "You've Got Light in Your Eyes," curated by Bostonian art lover Meighan O'Toole.
May 2-June 26, 2009