Collective Arts Network Triennial Prize winner Amy Casey will display her work in an exhibition opening Sunday at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown

CAN is a nonprofit organization serving the visual arts industry in and around Cleveland, providing a public forum for promotion, reporting and reviews. Its primary projects are the quarterly print magazine CAN Journal, the website CANjournal.org and a blog and e-newsletter.

It also presents the CAN Triennial, a regionally focused exhibition featuring northeast Ohio artists, selected by an intergenerational and diverse curatorial team and representing this moment in time, place and history in Cleveland.

Liz Hicks, director of collections at the Butler, and Susan Carfano, executive director’s assistant and PR / marketing manager, attended the exhibition and chose a few to consider for an exhibition.

Casey, a painter and printmaker, was selected for the Butler prize as part of the institutional category, and will exhibit her work at the Youngstown museum.

In her exhibition “Headlong Towards a Precipice,” Casey draws inspiration from the buildings in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland where she lives. Using images of buildings as stand-ins for human action and endeavor, Casey has made a large series of paintings that explore and expose various mechanisms of catastrophe. In some images, piles of buildings are stacked so high, they begin to topple under their own weight. In others, they explode into the sky or lie wrecked and shattered into rubble. Some recent images show buildings more or less subsumed by floods and surrounded by oceans of water.

According to Casey, “My work frequently touches on or is driven by my anxiety and hopes for the world. Too much news! It weaves its way in. I think my work has long seen the world and our place in it as insecure … Seeing interesting things around me is a big motivator to make paintings. It feels like it raises the stakes in my paintings for me. That I’m holding my own community in my hands in a way.”

Casey received her bachelor’s degree in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art and attended the Yale Summer School of Art and Music. She is a two-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Amy has gallery representation in Chicago and New York City and has had many solo and two-person exhibitions throughout the country.

“Headlong Towards a Precipice” runs through May 12 at the Butler, where a meet-the-artist reception will be held from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday.

If you go …

WHAT: “Amy Casey: Headlong Towards a Precipice”

WHEN: Sunday through May 12 with meet-the-artist reception from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday.

WHERE: Butler Institute of American Art, 524 Wick Ave., Youngstown.

HOW MUCH: Admission is free. For more information, go to www.butlerart.com or call 330-743-1107.

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