A member of the experimental folk duo CocoRosie, Bianca Casady has forged an equally potent career as a visual artist. Starting in 2003 by illustrating the band’s record covers and performance posters, Casady grabbed the art world’s attention four years later with a wild solo show of self-referential works at Deitch Projects. Following a string of exhibitions in Europe and Asia, she returns to New York with her best body of work to date. Exploring a gender-bending portrayal of male prisoners cast in feminine roles, Casady collages, assembles and draws her way through the psychologically charged selection of 70 pieces that provocatively constitute “Daisy Chain.”
The title describes a notorious sexual position involving multiple partners, and certainly fits the works on paper here of young nude guys with rosy cheeks wearing do-rags while masturbating under rainbows and ejaculating flowers and weeds. Other drawings depict muscular, black males veiled in burkas or transformed into tragic Pierrot and Cinderella characters with heads collaged onto porn-star bodies.
The largest portraitsÑdelicately rendered in watercolors, colored pencils and black teaÑare conventionally framed, while smaller, more brutal collages and manipulated photos are mounted in found frames, and clustered around altered pieces of furniture displaying Casady’s performance videos and collection of spiritually evocative junk. Described by the gallery as “a Genet-like fantasy,” “Daisy Chain” reveals the self-taught artist projecting her multiple personalities into Cheim & Read’s tidy white-cube setting.—Paul Laster