Casey McKee tries to examine humans in modern society while focusing more closely on contemporary social, political contexts. He draws on the issues of self-identity spurred by the overdose of social media as well as accelerating globalization, indiscriminating misdeeds of capitalism and neoliberalism. The critical view of the Arizona-born artist has been based on his own experience of working in Germany and the US. Based in Berlin for over 10 years and communicating with various types of people, he broadened his interest in to sociology and politics of the real world.
As a means to evoke interest and attention to this kind of issue he combines photography and painting. He prints a B&W image on canvas first and then paints oil on it. His works that criticize the established social structure and also enterprise-centered ideology were highly reviewed as the 2008 economic crisis of the US spread over to the world. In his paintings are shown images of urban yuppies who sacrifice themselves like warriors and of absurdity of the enterprise that instigate it. Thus, he argues that modern business management and marketing are no other than war tactics.
Apart from the above one he introduces a new series that deals with modern machine-based civilization and communications through the social network service. On the new series appears a man with spacesuit against the vast wilderness of Arizona. It was inspired by a short story ‘The Machine Stops’ by E.M. Forster who is famous for novels like ‘A Room with a View’ and ‘A Passage to India.’ This story was published in 1909, quite a long time ago, but depicts a future world where people communicate with each other only by means of social network service. It is just as if the author had witnessed today’s Internet-driven world to come. The artist said that he planned this series to make cracks on our experiences of the internet environment that has crept deep into our consciousness even to the extent that we can’t simply imagine our life without smart phones. He also maintains that we are connected to each other more closely than ever, but at the same time entrapped in a cocoon developed by high technology. The internet-provided contents, driven by highly sophisticated artificial intelligence ultimately for the purpose of advertisement, in actuality distort our views and just make us detached from the reality. The lonely spaceman in the desolate environment like somewhere on another planet may be a symbol saying that our experiences and relations dominated by the internet will in the end create destructive absurdity within us.
