Cassandra Mogusar

Artist Statement

I make tintypes using a process that has remained fundamentally unchanged for over 150 years. As a historian, I am drawn to the process for the connection to the past it provides; as an artist, I am drawn to the otherworldliness inherent in the medium. While I value the technical ability to create a clean plate, I also embrace the physical artifacts of the process. Visible pour lines and chemical marks serve as evidence of the handcrafted nature of the plate, emphasizing that each image is a physical object created in a bound moment. I use this quality to engage with memory and mourning, and the tintype becomes the tangible record of a moment now gone. Each plate fixes a vanished to honor what has passed and carry that memory into the future.

In my portraits, I often use multiple exposures or a blurring of identifiable features to remove individual identity, allowing the figure to stand in for a human in general. This technique highlights the impermanence of our existence; the person occupying the space is a transparent ghost, often set against a dark, featureless background. By obscuring the specific, I engage with the reality of mourning: the fact that none of us will be fully remembered in time, and we cannot fully remember those we have lost. Time eventually strips us of our individuality, leaving only the artifact of a human presence behind.

My primary approach to portraiture also informs my still life work, as I take "portraits" of objects that act as memories made visible. I take my cues from the artifacts themselves, moving between a sharpness that emphasizes their role as solid relics and a blurring that captures the transitory nature of both substance and light. Whether clear or obscured, these objects serve as the physical counterparts to the human ghosts in my work. They are the things that remain, or begin to dissolve, once the person is gone.

Ultimately, I seek to heighten the otherworldly nature of these images to show the tension between the fleeting human spirit and the permanent artifact. I hope that viewers come away with a sense of both the magic of this medium and how we honor and mourn what we cannot fully hold onto.