Robert J. Casella
Digital Artist, Photographer, Writer
Immerse yourself in the visual imagery of Robert Casella, where anti-heroes roam surreal landscapes and satirical humor comes alive. Sample his work and discover the unique narratives that challenge the boundaries of conventional visual storytelling. His art is alive with flawed, multi-dimensional characters and immersive other worldly landscapes. Casella invites viewers to enter his world of collage, revealing both its beauty and chaos, blurring the boundaries between the sacred and profane.
Neighbors in Nearby Space gathers images in which history, memory, popular culture, and invention collide.
Robert Casella builds strange, highly composed worlds from fragments that seem both familiar and displaced. Figures, objects, and symbols cross time and context, creating scenes that are seductive, unsettling, comic, and difficult to fully explain.
The work occupies the uncertain territory between recognition and dream—where images lose their fixed meanings and begin to speak to one another in unexpected ways.
Seeking Representation
Galleries, Photo books,
Art books
About
I am a documentary photographer and visual artist whose work explores the uneasy space between memory, history, spectacle, and desire. I belong to a lineage of politically charged collage and photomontage extending from Berlin Dada through Pop Art, Boris Lurie, and Martha Rosler. I regard Hausmann, Höch, Heartfield, and Grosz as predecessors who established montage as a language of satire, contradiction, and cultural critique. Working digitally, I carry that lineage into the present, using contemporary image-making tools to construct collisions between history, celebrity, violence, spectacle, and collective memory.
In my documentary photography, I strive to capture the close-up shot that most people would overlook as mundane, but it's where I see beauty and truth.
My work has been published in the journals Fiction International, Exquisite Corpse, ZYZZYVA, Journal of Experimental Fiction, Another Chicago Magazine, Cream City Review, Writer’s Block Magazine.
Digital Art and
Photography
digital portfolio
CITIZEN: 1989–2022 traces more than three decades of public life through Robert Casella’s street photographs.
Made in the flow of everyday life, the pictures are alert to gesture, expression, coincidence, and the small dramas that unfold without announcement. Strangers pass, wait, watch, perform, retreat, and briefly reveal themselves to the camera.
Taken together, the photographs form a portrait not of a single place or generation, but of social life itself—unplanned, contradictory, comic, lonely, and continually in motion.
