Graham Cassano's Practice and Process 2025-2026

Graham  Cassano uses film cameras, historical printing processes, spatial  disruption, phenomenal obscurity, and chaos, to explore repressed ruptures in experience, history, and time. Photography pursues the visible, but too often at the cost of forgetting the ineffable substrate that supports sense. Cassano’s is an archaeology of experience, and excavation is unavoidably destructive. What’s left is the skeletal architecture of the image, self-negating, and, consequently, transparent. By revealing the imaginary structuration that otherwise mystifies experience, each assemblage or print becomes an ostensive  gesture, pointing to the space beyond perception. Each image erases  itself.

Cassano’s  compositions and constructions thus depend upon the relationship between word and object, and upon the unpredictable interactions of their fractures. Philosophical and historical themes tend to dominate his vision. The “Emerson’s Fate” assemblage series explores Transcendentalism through the lens of urban dislocation, while his “unreadable” codices (“Terra Incognita” and “Vitrea Fracta”) use broken glass photograms to interrogate censorship, concealment, and forgetting.  Other pieces play on the boundaries of myth and fiction ("Orgone  Projector," “Imaginary Boxes,” “Time Travel”), or explore the tensions between aesthetic theory and practice (“The Mathematical Sublime,”  “Passing Through”). Nearly all the work is analog, most of it  monochrome, much of it cyanotype or silver gelatin. While the photographic print’s supposed evidentiary quality has been central to its discursive power, Cassano uses historical processes as deconstructive restoration, an intentional return to the mediating distance that splits sign and object. What remains is common ground, now unveiled as our shared anchorage in illusion. 

Amos Poe died on Christmas day. The obituary I found called his work intentionally slapdash. It’s ragged. Choppy. Broken. So with Television, early Blondie, the Ramones. But whether the song or the image hit, the aesthetic made sense. We didn’t see it as slapdash or unfinished or poorly edited or amateurishly recorded. Rightly or wrongly, we saw intention in the lack of tact, the same wounded phenomenology that flowed through Pasolini, Cassavetes, Godard, and Deren. The edges of their prints bled through. 

Peirce says reality is, primarily, a feeling. So I start from subjective preference. The simulacra of perfection bore me. The imperfect, the imprecise, the ambiguous, and the angular, draw me out of my center, produce the recrudescent breaker that foams in thought. I don’t mean thought as some cold, analytical, disembodied, Kantian formula. But that burning presence forcing words out of your belly like vomit in prelude to Psilocybin patterns. 

Begin with the force of things. Everything's cracked, and our stories, yellow tape, peeling and brittle with age. From there, justifications, for what they’re worth. Perfection is always a lie. Beautiful bodies aren’t cut, and photoshopped, and botoxed, and sanded, until not a cheek has edge. Beauty is the tensed muscle below sagging skin, the vagrant storefront, artifact, evidence, a last trace of life. The things we deny. But shame is revolt. And reality is revolting. 

Our categories, imposed for comfort, stability, and for the prerogatives of the powerful, no longer suture our doubts. Structures crumble. Even spectacle fails. And the demand is made—no, imposed—that we collectively pretend. The hypocrisy might be bothersome. But the boredom is intolerable. 

Maybe the Communists were wrong. It’s not the disenfranchised, the disinherited, the marginalized, and the immiserated who make revolution. True, the masses are angry, and miserable, and discontented, and the usual delusions no longer function with mechanical reliability. But more than that, we are bored. Mystification depends upon distraction. Without it, boredom rips the veil, revealing the corruption that pocks our flesh. But even with the ancient regime gone to the gallows, new categories, new systems, new certainties, compete for hegemony. No less deceptive. No less insufficient. No less boring... No revolution at all. 

Amos Poe... Ragged. Broken. The simulacra of foams in thought, like vomit. The force of things, cracked masses are angry, shame even fails. Delusions no longer function, vagrant storefronts, revolting new categories, insufficient boredom intolerable...from there, justifications, sanded artifact, trace of life...always a lie. 

Graham Cassano

January 2026