Artist’s Statement:
“Memoirs of a Screen” explores the ruins of drive-in theaters across the southeastern U.S. These screens featured classics from the 1950s onward, with as much drama played out on the field it faces as on its decayed screen. These communal events have become much rarer. Shifting tastes, screens, and uses of leisure time have relegated prime event space to a cattle pasture at the edge of town. The screen sits idly, like a noble ruin, while vegetation and entropy consume its surface.
Artist’s Bio:
Casey Lance Brown (b. 1978) is an American artist and photographer who studied at Duke University, Harvard University Design School, and the American Academy in Rome. Originally trained as a landscape architect, his work probes the perverse ways in which human systems use, abuse, divide up, and adapt to the planet’s surface.
All of his photography is digitally composited, resulting in detailed and expansive scenography which has been exhibited and collected in the U.S., Italy, UK and Switzerland. During the Rome Prize fellowship, Brown began investigating the ancient roots of land speculation in the Roman villa system. Through a combination of mapping, site photographic documentation, and historical scholarship, Brown revealed a system of land speculation stretching back to western civilization’s roots. This series, called “Landscapes of Speculation,” now includes sections from contemporary landscapes where investment drives rapid construction such as Miami and other leisure zones. The folly of these Potempkin developments comes to the forefront in comparison with the older Roman villas. What goes up…