Cassandra O'Flaherty

CV

Solo Exhibits:

2008 "Portraits of Everyone I've Ever Met, Ever"- Brookline L. Cambridge, MA 2009 "Cannibal Carnival" - ALLASIA. Cambridge, MA

Group Exhibitions:

2008

"November" - The Hive. Los Angeles, CA

2009 "Art Strikes Back" - Art Asylum Boston. Boston, MA

"Death & Destruction" - Ello Gallery. Portsmouth, NH

"Lady Luck" - All Asia. Cambridge, MA

"Easter Bunny Decadence" - Out of the Blue Gallery. Cambridge, MA

Galleries also currently showing or who have shown my artwork:

2008-2009 U*Space Gallery - Atlanta, GA

2008-2009 Peninsula Gallery - San Mateo, CA

2008-2009 Out of the Blue Gallery - Cambridge, MA

Artist Statement

(i.e. Who I Am. What I Do. & Why I Do It.)

My father harvested lush leviathan fields. My father was a fisherman of the Atlantic. He worked the dark chambers of her vault for god's awful crush. It took all of him. (Like Jonah sucked pale, pigmentless by the bile in the belly of a whale.) Along the cold coast, he'd discard what was without value. He'd clear his nets of sand sharks. Dozens dead, laid out side by side, like large sardines or soft torpedoes. I'd watch, standing back high on top of a steep shore slope, gripping the black roots of an old dead cypress for balance, where the sea had eaten away at the cliff and the land had fallen away winters ago, exposing the gnarly undercarriage and insect nature of her slick pedigree. My father lined the shore with sand sharks to keep me from the sea, to insure that these hands would not be his. My wrists, we both always knew would never thicken with work. When he'd gone, I'd walk down and around them barefoot, use the flat of my heel to push on their rough white bellies and sometime, dead baby sharks would be pressed out, perfect replicas or their parents, but only the size of trout. My cousin Josh had taught me that. I don't know how he came to find this out, maybe some kind of happy accident, maybe someone showed him, maybe lots and lots of people do this sort of thing. Maybe it's all very common. We (me and Josh) had a fort in the forest, not far from the shore line. We'd lug lots of them there. We'd hang sharks (big and small) whole from low slung branches. When we'd filled them full, we climbed higher. Sometimes (several times actually) while tending my dead, I'd lost my grip, fallen from her limbs salting my sternum with slashes, gashes and sores. But everyday, daddy's nets brought more. The trees were practically full. The birds would peck away pieces all during the day and at night, rats would bore perfect holes in the meat. Eventually all the flesh would rot and recede down to the gristle and that too would finally fall to the ground and be carried off by squirrels or such. Only jaws and some spine would remain intact. The gulls would swoop and scream "Father, all your sons are here" in my slack jaw forest.