CANDACE CASEY PHOTOGRAPHY

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Enter a world of Ethereal Abandonment as experienced by photographer Candace Casey who has built upon three decades of work to bring these lovely ruins to life. In each picture there is a piece of a larger story and layers that need to be uncovered.  Ruins beckon us to come explore, look closer. There is at once a sense of discovery and a feeling of long ago. In the accumulated debris find a slipstream of hope, the seeds for tomorrow and the roots of reclamation.

 

Candace sees the past, the livelihood of these places, their grandeur, the hordes of laughing children, mothers and fathers enjoying themselves in the theatre, the students sitting in neat rows of desks in the schools, the spirits of the houses of worship.  But also bears witness to the heart-breaking loss of these spaces to so many people who have cherished these experiences. The current decay is a sadness and reality of reclamation of the culture changing and the world moving on.  Candace experiences these buildings in multiple layers focusing on the juxtaposition of the objects left in place, intact.  Without moving or touching the objects, she captures these small stories as they have been left.  The images ask us to wonder how they got that way and what human intervention created these vignettes of layers of history and occupancy.

 

Side by side we see the past grandeur and the present decay—and something in between. Another world, an unearthly beauty that shines through. Ethereal Abandonment is a step back in time and, yet, also reveals aspects not seen before. With the assistance of Ellyzabeth Adler, her friend and muse, Candace has created a title and fictional narrative for each image to help viewers delve deeper to generate their own internal vision of how this all came to happen.

 

Candace began as a portrait photographer, but branched out to record her extensive travels. Eventually her work took her to the urban jungles of abandoned buildings. All her works are one-of-a-kind, digitally rendered onto film that is then manipulated using a specific photographic transfer process onto a variety of materials creating a collage effect  rendering each piece unique. She lives in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago with her husband David and continues to explore worlds both close and distant.