For as long as she can recall, Kasey Davis Appleman has been, “a collector, altar-maker and memento keeper,” the origin of her assemblages and “poetry objects” harking back to the days when she’d decorate cigar boxes – an exercise, and perhaps, long-forgotten activity that lights up the imagination and memories of people who see, and fall in love with, her work.

After earning her bachelor of fine art degree in painting and printmaking from Emmanuel College in Boston, she began transferring her collections onto canvas. “But I somehow felt unsatisfied,” she said. “I remember incorporating a piece of rust into a painting and there it was, my ‘aha’ moment.”

Appleman turned her passion for objects and collectibles into an art form. “I started taking pieces of driftwood and using discarded pieces of lobster traps from the beach in my work. It suddenly evolved into a bingo game of objects,” she said. “I just couldn’t be stopped. It was like I had been trying to speak a language my whole life and finally had an alphabet with letters and words of sorts. I also became obsessed with keys, locks, miniatures and more. My palette evolved from paint to the still life of objects (or the stuff). I’ve been making assemblage formally now for about 10 years.”
Indeed, it is the unexpected piece (or pieces) you find when you closely examine Appleman’s compositions that draw you deeper into her mishegas of carnival toys and bubble gum machine trinkets, old household items, former contents of children’s school boxes, old tobacco tins and a small piece of ceiling – and that’s just what you take in during your first viewing.

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