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Schadenfreud, which is German, basically means taking pleasure in other people’s difficulties. Taggart’s paintings depict how today’s media does just that. “My most recent work focuses on the media’s grip on our collective consciousness, and particularly that of women and girls” say’s Taggart. There is little a acknowledgement of the difference in value conferred between commercial and artistic enterprises, and the bizarre way the two are often juxtaposed and how they affect our values and perceptions.”
In the painting process illumination takes form slowly, it is added in thick wet strokes, it pours through glass set against a dark muted lavender; A tinge of cadmium orange amidst a scattering of white. Color becomes mood, it slips in and around the space, encircles, becalms. It performs as a mood ring is intended, flaring a different color as one’s body temperature rises or sinks with emotions, reflecting the sentience of the shifting lights and darks in the mind.
Objects take form and morph into subjects, conveying thought, feeling, even opinion. There is life in this white-coverlet bed, it grows in strange and uncomfortable ways.
This is a space bounded by walls and bones and muscle. It is an interior born of an interior life. It is a dream, conflicted, loves truck, overwhelmed. It is beautifully empty and painfully full.
Cassie Taggart grew up in New York City, studied art at University of New Hampshire, and in Sienna Italy. She earned a BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University, has galleries in Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, DC and New Hope, Pennsylvania. She Lives in
Potomac, MD.
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Teeth, oil by Cassie Taggart
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