Cassidy Early: Tomorrow’s Goodbye

September 15 - October 27, 2024

Slow Dance is very proud to present Tomorrow’s Goodbye, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chicago-based painter Cassidy Early.

The magic is in the middle

Early’s paintings investigate and linger within the “flimsy barriers between life and death, day and night.” Unabashedly tender, these paintings explore the anticipation of loss, which is often suspended through time, sometimes long before the loss has occurred. As Early notes, “We all love what we know we will lose.” Early’s handling of paint, often in sequential strokes that mimic the march of tally marks, cannot be separated from time and the sort of time-keeping that is held within the body—nonlinear, likes waves building and collapsing. The state of anticipation—an impending goodbye, a turning page, a new day—acknowledges both the present (where the past also resides) and the future, understanding all the fissures, the slippage, the making and un-making that build the bones of a self.

 My mother’s frankly British expression, skeptical of metaphor or miracle, on my face considering the flowers. The bright orange moon shines behind me, the magic keeps going even when you are bored by it, bitterly pessimistic about it.

In layered succession, the marks build images that shift in density and clarity, at times breaking apart or falling upon each other. Compositions are reflected; cut-outs disrupt the plane like sudden thoughts or flashes of memory. The paintings are, in this way, like run-on thoughts or associations, strung together, tenuous but deeply felt. They exist in a middle ground, that Early identifies as somewhere between “bitter optimism” and “warm despair.” For Early, these meditations are homed within the loss of a mother and the grief that exists both in the before—in the act of losing—and afterwards. The anniversary of loss is explored as both fresh and distant, evolving as a new relationship to love and those we’ve loved. Generous with feeling, as though wanting to be known, Early’s paintings exist in an emotional landscape that understands what is messy, fleeting, forever.

 The vase, the urn, the flowers, the dandelions, me, my brother, my mom, cigarettes, the dogs, the sky, the moon, the tile floor, the patterns, the trees. Light, lines, eyes, marks, color, pink, blue, commas, circles, squares.

 
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Are the flowers dead once they’ve been cut, though they may not look it? Are the dried flowers no longer dead, but something else entirely?