Career
His explorative art emphasizes narrative abstraction, aestheticism, and conceptualism. Throughout the 1990s, Walt Cassidy (then called Walt Paper) was at the center of the New York City Club Kids, an artistic and fashion-conscious youth culture. The group was a definitive force in New York City"s underground club culture at the time and made long-lasting contributions to mainstream art and fashion.
According to Cassidy, "The nightclub for me was like a laboratory, a place where you were encouraged and rewarded for experimentation."
Cassidy founded the band BOOB (1995-1998), a conceptual hardcore rock band composed of various club kids that began amidst the infamous Peter Gatien-owned nightclubs—Limelight, Tunnel, Palladium, and Club United States of America—as well as downtown venues CBGB and Don Hills.
Cassidy"s current work evolved from an interest in still life photography, sculpture and illustration. The Protective Motif, Cassidy"s first solo show in New York, debuted in 2010 at Invisible-Exports gallery in Manhattan"s Lower East Side.
The show included The Paper Photographs (2008), ink drawings and wall based sculptures, Nail Bomb (2009) and Through (2010). Cassidy works in cut brass, weaving, stripping, and hooking abstract patterns and textures on a wood frames.
These works are minimalist in material but maximalist in emotion, and operate where autobiography meets methodology.
The Nervous Peal (2011) drawings were exhibited in The Displaced Person at Invisible-Exports, alongside works by Sue Williams and Ron Athey. In this series of ink drawings of athletic sculptures, Cassidy examined structures that impose both conformity and alterity on the body. Carbon photography prints of idyllic male youths, framed within hand-drawn structures, reflect an eroticization of and dislocation from the male form.
Tellingly, Cassidy"s choice of settings includes New York"s Jacob Riis beach, honoring a man who documented the blight of the industrial era"s downtrodden.
2006 – Gay Art Now, curated by Jack Pierson, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City
2007 – The Believers, curated by Elizabeth Thomas and Nato Thompson, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Master of Arts
2008 – Womanizer, curated by Kembra Pfahler, Deitch Projects, New York City
2010 – The Protective Motif, Invisible-Exports Gallery, New York City
2010 – Closed for Installation, 303 Gallery, New York City
2011 – The Displaced Person, Invisible-Exports Gallery, New York City
2011 – The Unseen, curated by Adela Leibowitz, Torrance Art Museum, California.
