Future Tense by Jeff Casto

Opening Final Friday, May 27th from 6-11 pm is future tense new mixed media, sculpture, and assemblage by local artist Jeff Casto.
The exhibition will run through July 15th, with gallery hours Thursday thru Sunday: 12-4.

Jeff Casto may be a familiar name to many of you, he has been a prolific visionary in the Cincinnati art scene for many years now. His work shows constant progress with a unique sense of itself. While enjoying Casto's work over time, one may feel as though they were sifting through a personal collection of objects, elements, and sentiments- uniquely catalogued and immortalized by the artist.

I found myself wondering as I marveled at Casto's works in his studio, "where did you get all this stuff." A question that apparently I wasn't the first to ask based on the artist's response. He somewhat shyly but clearly hinted that some of the items that end up juxtaposed in his works are indeed found objects, personally collected from here or there, shops or gutters. What was truly charming in his answer was that many things were given to him by friends and acquaintances who knew his work, or simply knew of his passion for unique, adaptable trinkets. Old lockets with forgotten photos, plastic figures of every denomination, yard ornaments, jar lids, and mysterious pieces to the workings of expired machines are but a few of the inanimate populi in Casto's painted and sculpted pieces.

Jeff Casto's work is far more than a collection of misplaced objects and forms. It is methodical, melodramatic, and consists of a quiet yet lurking genius in its completion. The body of work presented for this exhibition at 1305 breeds fears of the revelation, the rapture, with our skewed imaginings of our future world. There is a din painted over the glossy mechanized universe we imagined in our youth, and the opportunities and objects we once believed the future would hold turn out to be nothing more than bits of plastic, metal, and space dust. Our world as when it used to be spoken of in future tense.