09.02—10.08.2022
In the Light of Day
Cassidy Early
Kisses, 2020, 48 x 36 inches, oil on canvas
Lauren Powell Projects is honored to present In the Light of Day, the first Los Angeles solo show from Chicago based painter Cassidy Early, on view from September 2 - October 8, 2022. This exhibition considers a grief two years in the making with a new collection of paintings expressing a mourning for their mother and their former self in limbo; ghosts that coexist in a cloud of tenderness, oscillating between states of despair and relief.
Early writes about the work,
“ In the last two years after my mom died I’ve had top surgery, gotten engaged, and have become fairly obsessed with dungeons and dragons. All three of these things are omnipresent in the work. Surgery completely flipped my relationship with my body, engagement was like a bright light in the darkness of grief, and D&D reminds me that in some worlds, magic exists. Sometimes I hear my mom’s voice in my head and it sparks a hope that maybe she’s still here somewhere, that maybe she sees me when I see myself. The ghost of me before surgery and the ghost of her just cheering me on.”
The painting Maps and Treasures features an ultramarine entity traversing an astral lake deep in the pocket of a monochromatic galaxy. They feel white hot laser beams arcing over their chest, followed by a cascading relief. They massage the healing wound and continue into the void, on their own adventure. Trans People are Angels reflects the neverending attempt to feel the glow – to feel the awesomeness of a malleable body and mind. To feel like a Natasha Beddingfield song instead of Puddle of Mudd. Early’s rainbows are hard fought and hard won. They are a beautiful reminder that we are surrounded by miracles, and that we are so, so small. We are a drop in the ocean of beauty.
In the Light of Day is a show about the sharply lit morning after. Consequences laid bare with nowhere to hide, visceral contrast evoking memories of loss and love. Paintings of blue lined yellow legal pad paper reference the notes Early’s mother left in the days between her cancer diagnosis and death. Here they drift, usually in a bright blue sky, illegible.
It’s hard for Early to not be romantic about their top surgery, how it reflects a change that distances them from their mother in an undeniable, physical way. Some days they hear her voice in their head - ‘good for you,’ before the puff and sharp inhale of a cigarette.
Cassidy Early, (b. 1994, Worcester, MA) is a Nonbinary Scottish American painter in Chicago, IL. They graduated from SAIC with an MFA in Painting in 2020 and received their BFA from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts in 2016. Early has exhibited in group and online exhibitions with La Loma Projects (Pasadena, CA), Green Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), The Salon at The Wing Chicago (Chicago, IL), and with “I Like Your Work,” Podcast. Their work has been published with Harpers Magazine (Nov. 2020), and as the LVL3 Artist of the Week (Oct. 2020).
Traumatically launched into body, into the light of day,
from now on all signs point to:
this is you, this is everything, this is it.
You’re here, until you’re not.
Feeling too often unfamiliar and unwelcome in your own skin, you feel trapped and irreconcilable. You paint this, and a way out by surgical procedure. You prepare to take a part of you away in order to really be here.
A year before your surgery, cancer takes your mother away.
After your surgery, you can’t paint for a while, and it’s been over a year since your mother died.
You, still in a body already always questioned, are wounded, and here.
Being in grief is overwhelming exposure. My ultimate witness, my mother, gone, I have to witness myself. Any lingering wish to escape myself gives way now to a clinging; I’m not prepared yet to be kicked out of my body forever. In order to stay in this new body, my body transformed, I have to heal. I find myself suddenly, viscerally present in a body that needs care.
I am as attached to me as a child is their mother.
Holding my body instead of trying to get out, I face death, head-on, three times at once: my mother, who I used to be, and, preemptively, who I am still becoming. How does one prepare for death? Painting is a way. Painting is a body in transformation.
Transformation may be chosen, or at least willingly approached. Transformation can also take over like a storm, with or without warning washing the ground away and obscuring all perspective until it passes. And when it passes, things are different–we are different. We can speak of a self before and self after–both knowable, both belonging, only one available to live in from now on.
From now on, my body cannot only be a container I bump up against from the inside, aching, wanting more, or less. There is a ghost (they will outlast me) who makes me breathe, makes me desperately want to be here. My ghost wants to remember and to be remembered. They inhabit my body and everything my body leaves behind.
Over the last few days of her life, your mother scribbled out note after note on a lined yellow legal pad. There were things she thought you needed to know–how to take care of the house or how to train the dogs for the next show cycle. The words barely came through, cancer in her brain, but the yellow paper trail traces the shape of her. You are also a trace, repeating her form in your own body. We echo the bodies we are born through.
Here I am, laying in the grass, living my afterlife. Is she watching me, or am I watching her? As I paint myself laying in the grass, am I in fact witnessing her doing the same on the other side? Is anyone watching? Is Mom watching from wherever she is now? Are we all a part of some expansive witness—only temporarily seeing from a limited, one-vesseled view?
Grief has made me want to believe in something magical–something I haven’t felt since I believed in God when I was a child. There are magical properties in a physical body that changes in time. A body transformed is an angelic body, radiant and mysterious.
Jessica Tucker
