Casey Baden

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

Casey Baden (b. 1991 Houston, TX) is a Los Angeles-based, interdisciplinary artist whose painting and textile works explore the transformative nature of human intimacy. Through paint, natural dye, woven cloth, and patch-worked sewing, Baden composes the surreal inner worlds of her subjects into scenes of domestic life and leisure. She borrows strategies from craft practices, surrealism, and impressionism, collaged together to create figurative narratives with a measured irreverence for convention and categorization. Her evocative tableaus feature figures that are not only subject to the shifting pressures and provocations of the physical world but also the pleasures and perils of the social and emotional realms. At times, the phantasmic bodies merge with lush, textural patterns or familiar domestic objects; elsewhere, their intertwining limbs dissolve, and their spectral forms collide. With restless variations of tonal contrasts, kaleidoscopic compositions, and rapturous sensory details, Baden visualizes the emotional undercurrents shaping empirical experience and the multifarious ways humans morph according to their environment. Through the use of material variety, she elevates the tactile possibilities of the canvas and engages the viewer in a dynamic kinetic experience. The overwhelming accrual of sensation and texture enacts the inescapable deluge of stimulus and information inherent to contemporary life.

Artwork