Casey Curran
About
In the dwindling light of a silver sky, a mass slowly expands and divides. Over and over it consumes its body spinning with the fury of not one mind, crashing into a thousand pieces. Pinned above a nameless field this is all one thing spread thin and finite across a wooded horizon. A crooked jaw of timber circles the pasture. Each tooth cut from the sky where once parted lips turned upward died, dried and fell away. Stalks bend in a soft wind slashing and caressing the dirt.
And from the curling mass framed against this yawning mouth an explosion of feathers tumble to the ground. Fluttering, it lands with the din of an echoing gunshot. In the grass a string of bones tethered to meat and skin flex, relax, and flex again. This is where scales become down. This is where wings are hewn into gold. Kneeling, we pluck dew drops with our finger pinched to thumb, and place them first left then right, blinking as the wetness spreads across our eyes.
They our not our tears. No, they our not our tears, but bodies rendered into cheap facsimile. A fleeting ether scraped from the land, set like little tinctures only to dissipate when corked and left too long in the drying air. But I've played these things, gasping in the vapor, wrung out with minutes chasing coins. Piece by piece I am collecting that which it was never not. That which it was never not. That which it was never not.
The work in this collection fosters a relationship between intricacy and destination. Revealed are the fragments that frame the identity of the whole subject. The process begins by unraveling the body and dissolving it into its various constituents. Symbolically, a transmutation from body to object takes place in the construction of sculptures, which act, like reliquaries to a congregation.
Each piece contains both the original body and the double as advocate for the first part of its second incarnation. As a final result, the work becomes an artifact of an extensive process, which consists of categorizing, duplicating, and coalescing a body into its various forms.

Artwork
Links
"Currently Hanging: Casey Curren", A review by Jen Graves on The Stranger's SLOG
"Interview with artis Casey Curren", By Eliot Fearey with Stay Thirsty Media
Woodside / Braseth Gallery

