In Scott Marvel Cassidy’s paintings, drawings and sculpture, it’s often times impossible to separate reality from a dreamlike state, or to differentiate the manufacture of a domesticity with the actual domestic life. Focused on intersecting themes of memory, the immediate physical environment, and the quandaries of referring to painting as purely “representational,” Cassidy’s painting, drawing and sculpture edge into territories of the uncanny and, at times, wormhole into the past.
When we met for a studio visit, Cassidy was in the middle of painting a painting of a bathroom medicine cabinet. In order to do this, he created a replica of his actual bathroom medicine cabinet at the home he shares with his wife, the comedian Maria Bamford, who will soon have her own Netflix TV show. The objects in their cabinet are believable, tangible and mundane: a half-empty bottle of baby oil, a glass with a razor and small scissors inside, a glass bottle of eye drops for their dog, Bert — a very old pug who enjoys being held and is blind and deaf yet still retains a keen sense of smell, among other objects. (Their other dog, Blueberry — “Bloobz” for short — is a surly yet lovable lady, but her medicines didn’t make their way into Cassidy’s painting.) Cassidy takes the real, creates a replica of it, and then paints that; in the process, the real becomes fake becomes representation becomes an object in the artist’s imagination.
Read the full story on KCET Artbound LA: http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/scott-marvel-cassidy-art.html
