Seismic Activity - "Quagmire" by Amy Casey, acrylic on paper.

If the latest roller coaster at Cedar Point is a little too scary but you still want to upgrade your vertigo, try zooming in on yourself via Google Earth. It'll leave you feeling like a bug in a teacup on a plate at the end of a twirling stick. Or maybe like one of Amy Casey's amorphous, appealingly non-human urban creatures occasionally seen in her latest paintings, tossed like arugula as their old neighborhoods are upended in paroxysms of sudden, violent change.

Casey has painted increasingly profound visions of home and its insecurities since her 1999 graduation from the Cleveland Institute of Art. A few years ago her small and mid-sized acrylic on canvas works typically stirred together and inverted interior and exterior views of a vividly intimate, tactile world. Wallpaper patterns became landscape elements, as an evolving cast of characters (in one work from 2001 they were little yellow chicks) reenacted family stories or later, adult experiences. By degrees Casey's painted world became a hostile, if beautiful, place, plagued by towering factories and overabundant, toxic plant life. Diminutive mutant families crouch in dismay in these works, like Dust Bowl-era Okies headed for the storm cellar, powerless to prevent a coming apocalypse.

Then, apparently, it came. For the past year or two, Casey's downtown 'scapes have turned almost literally upside-down. Roads tear loose from their guard rails, bucking high in the air as they rain down clods of earth and orange traffic barrels, while houses hang on to their foundations with the utmost difficulty, if at all. Mysteriously, much of this seismic activity shakes Casey's neighborhood while it's propped up on a makeshift trestle of stilts, as if somebody was somehow attempting desperate damage control. However that may be, a painting like "Surrounded" can come to no good end. Along the lower margin of that acrylic on paper work, a jumble of houses is seen sinking into a morass of crazy, crab-claw plants. Above them a delicate blue bridge carries a section of blacktop to nowhere, while to the right, two intact clapboard dwellings perch on a little toupée of turf, held precariously aloft by a cat's cradle of skinny timbers. Looking more closely, we see a spiky, spunky little Casey critter gamely using its pseudopods (or whatever) to shoot baskets against the garage. Whether this is an act of bravura or a case of denial, or both, is anybody's guess. The infectious visual motion of Casey's latest compositions pulls the viewer into a loop of imagery and texture that is at least as giddy as it is pessimistic, like a child's game of snakes-and-ladders, but mixed with intimations of doomsday and a hefty dollop of plain old daily anxiety.

Recent Yale graduate (MFA 2007) Breehan James has a different take on home and hearth. Her paintings and prints here are mostly studies for larger works ("which wouldn't fit on the plane," she explains), but even so stand on their own as semi-idyllic visions of a family time warp. Several are oil and acrylic on canvas depictions of a cabin and its environs, where the James clan gathers. The place is Wisconsin and the time is, as she remarks, basically the 1960s - "nothing has changed up there since then." Her "cabin view from lake" is a lovely work that owes much to several American painters who have dealt with landscape and modes of visual simplification. It brings to mind both the self-taught, post-impressionist influenced, deeply American landscapes of Fairfield Porter, and more recent meditations on suburban life by fellow Yale grad Jennifer Bartlett. Fresh and well-composed, it presents the swooping horizontal tangle of branches and vertical pattern of tree trunks that clothe a sojourn in the woods with great verve and spontaneity. The simple, clear-eyed nature of these works is celebratory in its appreciative response both to nature and to the qualities of the various paints that James employs. Each image seems like a conscious emblem of a place, or an event, or even a lifestyle, in the most resonant sense of that phrase - a life conducted in a manner that expresses something of its personal history and essential being. They speak of a life (or part of a life) lived close to the land in a specifically American vein.

James' "deer hunting" shows a grassy clearing or park that flows up to a line of trees in the middle distance. The antlered body of a deer lies in the foreground just above the righthand corner of the canvas, pierced by arrows. James reports that one family member is a bow hunter, and this is simply a picture of that. Certainly the scene, while perhaps a little sad, is not sentimental. The fact of the dead animal is presented in the same visual tone as the other elements in the work. And although the deer is much nearer to us than are the trees, it is still small. We're seeing it from some distance, but this painting also seems to be one in which James is headed toward a manner more obvious in other paintings and prints here, where she moves toward folk-art references and sources. It's a mode that proceeds toward its subject intuitively rather than objectively, and therefore the smallness of the deer is likely to be a comment as much as a visual fact: It's either not important to the painter, or represents a fact the painter wishes to minimize.

Questions like these, having to do with the conventions of depiction as they relate to the ordering of private experience, peek out from behind James' deceptively simple images, making comments about the psychology of intimate places, about home and the events and habits that constitute a sense of belonging in the world.

ARTS NEWS

The arts may be about expression and communication, but money, in the end, is what talks. That's why it took years of documenting the economic spinoff from the arts economy before Cuyahoga County supported a plan to provide public money for the arts.

Now that idea - not the arts' intrinsic, expressive, communicative beauty, but its potential for economic return - is being used at the national level in an attempt to boost public funding. The Washington, DC-based Americans for the Arts recently released "Arts and Economic Prosperity III," a report that has a lot in common with the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture's research into arts and the Cuyahoga County economy. Columbus, Cincinnati and Mansfield, Ohio were among the 156 communities that contributed local economic impact studies to the larger effort, but Cuyahoga County was not represented. The report is touted as the most comprehensive economic impact study of the nonprofit arts and cultural industry ever conducted in the US.

The findings were as follows: The nonprofit arts industry nationwide generates $166.2 billion in economic activity annually, which - despite nonprofit status - results in $29.6 billion in federal, state and local tax revenues, according to Americans for the Arts.

Further, the report finds that the arts economy generates 5.7 million full-time equivalent jobs and $104.2 billion in household incomes.

Americans for the Arts chief counsel for government and public affairs Nina Ozlu says the report will be a cornerstone in the argument to boost funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, led by House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Norm Dicks (D-WA.). In late May, the subcommittee approved a $35 million increase for the NEA in its 2008 spending bill. On a current budget of $124.4 million, that's an increase of more than 25 percent, but it still won't restore the agency to its 1992 level of funding ($176 million). The agency suffered massive cutbacks in the mid-'90s when Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America attempted its complete elimination.

Passing the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, though, is only a first step in the process. Next the bill goes to the House Appropriations Committee, where Ozlu expects no substantive change, and then through an identical process in the Senate. Her hope is that the bill completes Senate review before August recess and can go to the president for signature into law in the fall. If the president signs off, that would be the largest increase ever in the history of the NEA. -Michael Gill