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.