Awe and Wonder

As a child living in central Illinois, Bruce Cascia was given a Brownie camera by his father. The simple cameras were barely more than a box with a lens and a shutter release. They held film—“Two and-quarter by two-and-a-quarter,” Cascia recalls—but there was little room for bells and whistles.

- BRUCE CASCIA

“I would use it to shoot all around the old farmhouses. So many of them were abandoned and it always was intriguing to me,” the Chicago-based artist says. “The people who lived in them had reached a point to where they had to move or were forced out, and they just left them. They were time capsules and no matter how much my parents admonished me I would sneak inside to get a sense of the people who had lived there.”

Those childhood memories of exploration, and of just witnessing the remnants of human life on those vast farms, are the inspiration for Cascia’s newest batch of paintings that will be presented at a show beginning September 1 at Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.