Name: Graham Cassano

City of Residence: Pontiac, MI

Featured Artwork: The Mathematical Sublime and Louis

Exhibition: Identity Maps: Juried Photography Exhibition, CTAC - Petoskey's Bonfield Gallery

On View: now through November 2, 2024

Tell us about the creative process for the featured piece in our exhibition: The images in the assemblages are contact prints from large format (4x5, 8x10) negatives. After the photo shoots, I developed the negatives, and then printed them using hand-made cyanotype chemistry on archival paper and manufactured silver gelatin paper. I then cut the prints into pieces and bound them to blocks and tiles. The actual assembly of the final works took the most time. I sat with the tiled images for weeks, re-arranging and altering the structure until the piece announced its completion. During this entire process, I guided assembly, but was not fully in control of the process. I listened to the materials, and negotiated their capacities. The process is an authentic dialectic between my artistic intentions and what the materials will allow. Each final assemblage took its own form, sometimes quite different from my original goal.

Who or what inspires your creativity? Let me separate the question of inspiration into two themes: context and progenitors. My process is driven by the social demands of our moment. New technologies increasingly colonize the lifeworld, making each one of us a servant of our machines. My handcrafted work is both a critique of, and an antidote to, modernity’s poisonous and uncontrolled development. Through the use of outmoded technologies, I interrogate technological “progress” and insist that the viewer pause, both in the gallery and in life, and take stock. When lived experience flows at light speed, art functions as a kind of dream, freezing movement, and demanding explanation.

The stylistic elements that inform my assemblages emerge from the history of art, but not from the history of photography. As a photographer, my eye has been shaped by an extended study of early twentieth century cinema, especially the work of Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau, John Ford, Orson Welles, and film noir. To the extent possible, my still works evoke that history through spatial disruption, displacement, and dislocation. Each assemblage contains a narrative, and each narrative ironically recontextualizes cinematic symbols. In addition, I am inspired by thinkers and artists from the Enlightenment and Romatic periods, especially Vico, William Blake, Poe, Mary Shelley, and Emerson.

Where can visitors learn more about your work? You can visit my website: https://cassanophotography.com/

Artist Bio: Graham Cassano is an artist and a Professor of Sociology, living in Pontiac, Michigan. He has an active exhibition schedule, and has published peer reviewed, book-length studies of film, music, and urban inequality. While his art often reflects upon the social currents of his region, he is also inspired by surrealism, by dreams, and by psychoanalysis. He holds a Ph.D (Sociology) from Brandeis University (1991), and an MFA (Photography) from the Cranbrook Academy of Art (2023). For the 2024-2025 academic year, he is on professional leave from his teaching position at Oakland University in order to pursue art practice full-time.

LIGHTNING ROUND!

• I'm inspired by: The ambiguities of language, the harmonies of jazz, the aura of late 1940s cinema.
• When I work, I listen to: The white noise of the air filters in my darkroom.
• For inspiration, I listen to: John Coltrane, Tina Turner, Jimmie Rodgers, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk
• I studied: Photography, sociology, philosophy.
• "One" art-related thing I can't live without: Experience
• Three words that best describe me: Thoughtful, obsessive, talkative.
• Three words that best describe my art: Distant, intimate, artisanal.

Thank you to Graham Cassano for participating in our Artist Spotlight Q&A series!