Cheim & Read is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by multi-media artist Bianca Casady. The show will present installation works, drawings, collages, photographs, audio and projected video works. Casady’s recent group of works address ideas of gender and race, especially as they are played out in prison. Themes of wounds/scars/reconstruction, monsters, power and subordination are explored. The feminization of the male as a means of domination is depicted in a Genet-like fantasy.
Casady’s collages employ rough ... Read more
Cheim & Read is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by multi-media artist Bianca Casady. The show will present installation works, drawings, collages, photographs, audio and projected video works. Casady’s recent group of works address ideas of gender and race, especially as they are played out in prison. Themes of wounds/scars/reconstruction, monsters, power and subordination are explored. The feminization of the male as a means of domination is depicted in a Genet-like fantasy.
Casady’s collages employ rough techniques, often sewn or taped together, with erasures which can transform a prison’s stark reality into a metamorphosized stage of beauty and horror. A flower blooms where once existed a phallus. The Harmless Monster suite of large drawings morph from one work to the next. We see images of Cinderella, slaves, maids, widows, black widows, veils/burkas, rainbows and butterflies, wild flower gangs, prison fairies, mops and brooms, hankies and rags, hairnets and do-rags, broken teeth, jagged crystals, moon worshippers, thugs in dresses and swamp monsters.
Born in 1982 in Hawaii, Bianca Casady, whose mother is an artist and sister is her musical partner in the duo Cocorosie, had no formal education after the age of 16. She studied linguistics, sociology, visual arts and writing on her own. Her work, both as a musician and a visual artist is highly varied, experimental, subversive, yet integrated. Casady is responsible for the visual components of her band Cocorosie – designing album art, background projections, makeup and costumes. Her gallery and museum installations elucidate a multifaceted design. Casady’s music and art are radical developments in today’s contemporary art mix.
Recent projects include choreographing and directing two dance works, performed in March at Kampnagel in Hamburg. She and her sister, Sierra, curated the Donaufestival 2012 Festival, a music and performance festival in Krems, Austria, held in April. In February, Casady, in collaboration with her mother and sister, participated in the Arts in Marrakech International Biennale (4th Edition).
Bianca Casady’s Daisy Chain is the first major New York exhibition since her 2007 Lil Girl Slim “Cosmic Willingness” Pipe Dreamz A Revelation exhibition at Deitch Projects. A catalogue, Daisy Chain, will be published by the gallery, with texts by the artist and Diego Cortez. A storytelling and dance tableau vivant by the artist, will take place during the opening reception.
