Cassidy Ott Throat Goat, 2025

Cassidy Ott is an interdisciplinary painter and comic artist who explores the dynamic intersection of banality and viscerality within her work. She uses painting to find equal visceral weight in our sociocultural environments and our physical bodies. Ott seeks to inspect how we constantly construct and deconstruct our sense of self while also investigating the absurdities involved with inhabiting a physical body. Juggling neuroscience, comics, and self portraiture, her work often examines the see-saw dichotomy of nature vs. nurture. Ranging from frenetic abstraction to devotional figuration, Ott employs a variety of painterly languages to communicate the necessity of fragmentation in order to communicate a holistic self. Consumption guides these investigations, whether it be capitalist tenants of consumption implicitly shaping our identities or the phenomenon of the female body being posited as made-for-consumption. Ott's work utilizes a spectrum of processes and aesthetics in order to convey the complex process of understanding oneself." 

Cassidy earned her Bachelors of Arts in Art, with a double minor in Neuroscience and Psychology, from the University of Alaska Anchorage. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s painting and drawing department.