PRESS RELEASE

Time is a snake in the grass and the grass is a gift: Lay in its blades, Of soft distraction.

Miami, FL (August 11, 2014) – For her debut solo at Primary Projects (PRIMARY), Autumn Casey presents “Agalma”, a show of sculpture, objects, and video – a gift to her audience, and dark meditation on the sublimity of self-reflection. Agalma is an ancient Greek term for offerings to the gods. A votive object intended to woo them, it’s a token of beauty presented to gain favor, luck, redemption, etc. Casey is an artist who investigates the relationship between people and objects; how we empower them, and the power they have over us.

For “Agalma,” she uses the materials she’s canvassed throughout her life—curios of her childhood, mysteriously familiar kitsch, ephemera she’s instinctively attracted to—to create a sentimental haunt of personal and local history. One that suggests, perhaps: the more personal we get, the more universally we appeal. Or, instead or in addition: with the act of introspection, we see that the boundaries between beauty and horror are more fluid, less distinguished, than they’re usually made out to be. Or at the very least, ahem, we get a window onto the artist, Autumn herself. The result is that we’re left tracing the outlines of our own history, the irretrievable rush of youth, the tensions between moments of fragility and strength, the secret lives of objects and environments from our lives and how they inspire sweet nostalgia one moment, then a creepy sort of hollow feeling the next. Thus, the fractured though no less robust bond between people and inanimate things. Above that, of course, “Agalma” is about the relationships between people, and the weird space between one’s self and what might be thought of as a deeper self, something that looks like truth or meaning, but which is mostly ungraspable.

Opens September 6, 2014


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Autumn Casey (b. 1987, Dallas) draws on a variety of personal relics and pop-cultural ephemera, both abject and singular, to challenge and question her subjectivity of the world at large. Her practice, which moves from sculpture to collage as well as video performance, considers the history of the found object and assemblage-redeploying existing materials or moments in unexpected, idiosyncratic ways. The result is a body of work that vibrates along the tense cord between the personal and the vernacular. Casey studied sculpture at the New World School of the Arts (BFA 2011) in Miami. Her work can be found in various collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, where she won the 2010 Optic Nerve XII, and the Perez Art Museum Miami, PAMM.

Primary (Est. 2007) is a context and research-driven curatorial collective with an emphasis on public art. We thrive amongst the self-taught, working-class misfits, who explore the margins of a new Americana through pungent, human-focused narratives. Our program engages with the raw and uncanny, celebrating border voices, bootleg culture, and intergenerational commentary, connecting the new and unseen with broader audiences and evolving collections.

For further information, please contact info@thisisprimary.com