The current exhibition, Drawing Is A Door To One Drawing More, Casey Monda Art Advisory presents work by Cleveland-based artist Joey Goergan.

It’s mid-February in Buffalo. Two and a half feet of snow on the ground, and a warehouse is having a punk show anyway. There’s a mural of oranges and pinks on the wall. Skaters cut back and forth on a ramp. A band plays, people mosh. This has been Joey Goergen’s world since his teens and it is the emotional source material underneath his seemingly spontaneous, whimsical, even cheerful drawings.

Goergen’s prints and drawings borrow their process and presentation from the punk world, the kind of vacant, overlooked spaces where misfits gather to daydream and build things nobody asked them to build. These are places that exist beyond the reach of the general public until someone goes looking for them. Goergen goes looking, and then translates what he finds into a new context for whoever is standing in front of the work.

The drawings and paintings themselves are fast and unplanned — free-form responses in gouache and flashe paint to patterned shapes already forming on the paper. Triangles, flannel-shirt plaids, his personal catalog of imagery that pays homage to people Goergen has lost to suicide and overdose. The pattern is where the meditation happens. It’s how the work holds grief and loss alongside his attempt to find joy in the same space without either one canceling the other out.

From there, new forms branch off and grow. Figures surface inside the patterning the way architecture might surface in a wall of repeated marks — not concealed, exactly, just waiting to be noticed. The repetition works like a mantra, a way of staying grounded inside the reverie rather than getting lost in it. The whole thing moves the way consciousness does: pattern into shape into image, fluid rather than fixed, pulled out of that space and set down on paper. Goergen has described it as sticking your hands into a stream to flip over rocks and see what’s underneath — the work is that same kind of looking. Not decorative. An excavation, done slowly, with your hands in the water.

As one drawing begins to bloom and take on its own life, the seed of a new one begins to implant. In this way, each drawing opens the door to the next, and it is through this process of incremental steps, the artist makes his way toward healing and renewal.

Joey Goergen (b. 1994, Buffalo, New York) currently lives and works in Cleveland, OH. He received his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in Drawing and Printmaking in 2018 and an MFA from the University At Buffalo in 2024. Joey teaches at Kent State University and has shown work at Transformer Station in Cleveland and The Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York. His works often manifest in works on paper and have also reached into installation and sculptural works that explore the shapes and themes presented in his drawings.

For more information on the work in this exhibition and how to purchase, please email casey@caseymondaartadvisory.com