The artist Casey Weldon is so shy that he ducked out of his own opening, telling the owner where he would be hiding. That left me with his work (most importantly) and his brief artist’s statement. The exhibition title, Put You in Your Place, refers to societal structures that shape and define who we are. As Weldon states: “Trying to fit into these man-made atmospheres, we end up changing ourselves ...”—the paradox being that through the act of painting he asserts his as well as his subjects’ individuality, and defiantly places the man-made structures so far in the distance that they barely register on the viewer. He mostly paints, in loving detail, the animal kingdom, including people.
To understand how and why he does this, you have to understand that Weldon’s paintings are like puzzles in which words play an important part. He clearly loves wordplay, but he can also use it to seriously critique society.
When he’s not making a large point, he is just having fun making verbal puns visible, as in “Coccinellid (ladybug),” with a silhouetted woman pattern instead of spots on the bug.
When serious, he plays with words in a different way; in “Sparrow Minded,” by rhyming the words narrow and sparrow, he is able to use the concrete images of sparrows to convey the abstract concept of narrow-mindedness by having the birds lined up uniformly on a woman’s outstretched arms. In “Decoi,” the altered spelling of decoy allows him to depict a man waist-deep in a koi pond, so anxious to fit in he is tattooed with koi fish. Similarly, in “The Ink Fields” a woman with a butterfly tattoo in the small of her back (which completes the circle of butterflies around her body) suggests “think fields.” Upended tattoo needles that resemble factories are set on the distant horizon, almost invisible through the use of atmospheric perspective. Is the artist commenting on the current tattoo craze, or is he making the larger point that human beings are, in essence, more a part of nature than of their man-made environments?
He takes a different tack in the painting titled “The Ghetto,” which depicts a black boy standing on a grocery crate, the background formed of two hills made up of “ghetto blasters” that resemble trash heaps. The boy is holding a white-outlined tape player with earphones and a mic that is less solid and real than the background. It subverts the message of a recent television ad that optimistically superimposes young people’s dreams of their future on their current environments.
Several of his paintings omit humans altogether, but refer to them, either directly or obliquely. In the former mode are “Sloth” and “The Emperor,” whose subjects he anthropomorphizes to illustrate two of the seven deadly sins: sloth, in the form of a sloth hanging from a bottle of beer; and pride, in the form of a three-quarter-length portrait of a haughty, regally attired emperor penguin. What the concept lacks in originality, the execution makes up for with the skillful rendering of fur, feather, cloth and gold braid.
The most imaginative painting in the exhibition doesn’t stop engaging the viewer after the initial Oh, I get it. Titled “Nuclear Family” (above), it has a double meaning—one all warm and cozy, the other devastating. It’s a formal portrait of a handsome male Labrador retriever, his robot mate and their glowing-eyed offspring.
My initial reaction was How adorable! Until I imagined the horror of a post-apocalyptic future in which bioforms can no longer breed naturally.