if you're shuffling toward a black hole Collage

Casey R. Klein is an abstract painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. A self-taught artist, she has been creating work with the same underlying sentiment for over I5 years. My artistic practice is heavily influenced by sexuality, dreams, memories, grief, and how those intangible experiences expose my identity. I am drawn to working on paper and chose this as my medium because of its vulnerability to my errors. I spend a great deal of time with the work and the raw materials that eventually become a finished piece. There's a physicality and sensuality in being present with the substrate, allowing it to breathe and sit in dialogue with it. It forms an intimate bond. Introducing myself to the substrate and receiving permission to perform is essential to the outcome of the final work. Each piece is a narration, a fluid story revealed using abstract forms and striking color, all circumscribed by a perimeter of negative space. My fingers are guides that precisely fold and tear, creating the canvas. My hands generously saturate pigments pulled across this newly formed parchment terroir, leaving behind a light impression of the once opaque smear. Through repetition of this process, I build layers of opacity and transparency that lay and overlay as a protectant shell. Each mark is strategically and carefully placed, though, with an unknown outcome. My work emerges in the forms of stories and riddles that ask questions informed by the intangible but have no answers.