Artist comments on the society by using an eccentric combination of photography and painting

By Maha Hassan Last updated Apr 21, 2019

We all harbor different opinions about the society and its evolution however, very few of us are able to make a statement about these strong views without offending others. Amidst the confused free speech that the society is facing these days, contemporary artist Casey McKee finds a unique creative outlet to register his opinions.

McKee’s artwork, The Machine Stops, which shows an astronaut wandering off in a desolate landscape comments on how people nowadays are more connected to machines rather than their surroundings and the earth. “Despite being more connected to one another than ever before through the internet and social media, people—particularly in the ‘developed’ world—are also more alienated than they have ever been,” explains McKee. “We live in technologically advanced societies, and we are isolated within our high-tech cocoons.”

To convey the conflict of the subject, the artist has adopted an ingenious method that lies somewhere in between photography and painting. McKee has invented and mastered this technique after quite a lot of experimentation. He started off with using liquid emulsions to print his photography on different materials such as, raw wood, paper and recently, on canvases. For this particular project, the artist has started incorporating paints to print out the photographs onto the canvas, giving the artwork an eccentric look that has never been seen before. The artist shares an insight about his use of two mediums by commenting, “After over twenty years of this evolution, my works now tend to be heavily painted, often adding elements into the images with paint that weren’t there originally. I enjoy the interplay between the two mediums, where it is not always clear where the photograph ends and the paint begins.”