Casey Roarty digs through Facebook Marketplace listings and transforms his findings into art

When you move house, there are a few things that tend to happen. First you pack up everything in a box, then you do the landlord spesh – i.e. the fill-the-hole-with-tissue-and-paint-over-job – and ask some strong people to help you lift everything. Now let's not forget an important step of the process, which involves either bin bags headed for the charity shop or selling anything that's worth a dime (and the effort of photographing it) online. Then once you've moved in, the rite of passage: the hours upon hours spent digging into Facebook Marketplace listings and finding some absolutely stellar bargains, sometimes sold to you with exceptionally artful or plain weird photography.

That's what happened when Casey Roarty moved house. As we all do in this situation, he found himself spending a "silly" amount of time on Marketplace and getting lost down many rabbit holes. "I started noticing a lot of strange and unintentionally beautiful images on there," he says. "Awkward crops, harsh flash, domestic lighting, blurred and scribbled-out faces and heavy image compression – giving the images a soft, almost painterly quality. Because these images are made purely for practical reasons, the beauty is often accidental and therefore overlooked."

Sandwiched between the countless fake ads for boneless sofas and images that have been duped from real-life brands and faked in Photoshop, that's where you'll find them. The real unsung heroes of Marketplace selling – the dimly lit, slightly fuzzy ones; the ones where you can see the seller's face reflected in the mirror; the ones that make you question whether they're ancient or just really badly shot; the ones taken by actual humans.

"I'd been thinking a lot about AI and what it means going forward for art and image making," says Casey. "We've moved into a time where perfectly polished images are incredibly easy to generate, and it's often hard to tell whether something was touched by a human at all. In that context, I think the story and process behind the work becomes more important than ever." This is what formed the making of his personal project, Is This Still Available? – an artistic recreation of the images found on this haven of second-hand goods.

There are many things we love about this project, not least the weird and wonderful listings that would catch Casey's eye during his research. Sometimes it would be a fancy dress costume laid flat, the character completely warped, or a vintage toy that reminds him of his childhood, or the seller's hand creeping into the shot. "You have to dig, and the magic is in the third or the fourth photo in the listing – where you see the object from a different angle, or you see something unexpected that wasn't meant to be part of the picture."

When he finds his golden image, Casey will tap into his graphic design background to crop into unusual details, to isolate and simplify the image, or to add handcrafted details like pencil or pastel marks, until it becomes a completely different thing. "It's a bit like staring at a word for too long until it stops making sense and you start seeing something else. That's what I'm often looking for."

And let's just say the Marketplace algorithm was certainly in his favour. In the series, you'll see recreations of less unusual listings like a faulty 65-inch TV, wooden toy trains or a collection of vintage gold-framed wall mirrors. But then there are the weird ones: a knock-off G.I. Joe doll figure, a life-sized Marilyn Monroe statue, climbing holds pinned into a wall, vintage nativity figurines of Mary and Joseph (that light up and go on the lawn), and playground slides sold with a rock wall.

There's also a listing which sold dummies for martial arts – which is one of Casey's favourites: "These big, aggressive, human-like objects designed for punching and kicking," he says. "When scrolling through the listing images, I noticed two of them in the far-left corner of one of the images, squashed up against each other as if they were sharing a kiss. I cropped in on that detail, and immediately the context of the image had changed. Something built for violence had now become tender and intimate. Probably not what the seller was aiming for."

Casey is a freelance graphic designer by trade who found his way through music – making artworks for bands and also landing a job at Warner Music before going his own way. And through Is This Still Available? he's able to flex his creative muscles and see how far he can stretch the idea. "I didn't start it with any fixed outcome in mind, and that's part of the fun for me. It's just a space for me to keep experimenting and making things instinctively," he says.

"We're surrounded by so much slick, 'impressive' imagery now, and I've become more and more interested in things that feel odd, specific and human. I suppose the project is partly a response to that – digging around somewhere messy and uncurated to see what can be found and given another life."