My name is Cassius, my friends call me Cash. 🏳️⚧️
Juxtaposing acid-trip colors with melancholic characters, I draw a surreal picture of what it means to be alive in this day and age. Through all of the confusion there is beauty, and through all of the wonder there is suffering. I long to depict that.
Currently located in Seattle.
self portrait on right shot on medium format film.
Review from Beware Magazine article about my work -
"Based in Los Angeles (previously), Cash Danielsen likes to stir up trouble in his photographs. Through his portraits, he forges a surrealist aesthetic by focusing on a palette of electric and unreal colors, which immediately provokes a sensory overload. His creations produce a sufficiently striking effect that one immediately feels blinded by the image.
Graduating in 2016 from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, he specialized in photography and then followed group and personal exhibitions in art galleries. His work evolves between analog, digital and motion design photography.
The originality of his photography lies in this juxtaposition of tangy colors and emotionality (most often melancholy) embodied by his subjects. His photography relies heavily on artifice: high heels, fishnet stockings, wigs, accessories, prostheses, makeup and body painting on yellow, bright red, turquoise blue, indigo or candy pink backgrounds. Cash Danielsen pushes the aesthetics of his photographs to the point where they reach an unreal dimension. His characters blend in or, on the contrary, emerge from the decor. Queers, drag queens (with whom the artist collaborates) participate in a theatrical production. As if we were looking at tableaux vivants.
In the photographer's work, there is a questioning of the order of fantasy, of travesty, a staging of the body which had been brilliantly explored by the artist photographer Pierre Molinier. Except that at the time (late 1960s), his sulphurous clichés had made him a [less] understood transgressive artist. Today, Cash participates in a new writing of the codes of portraiture, notably through this transformation of the body taken to the extreme. But beyond the portrait, he seeks to freeze an interiority, the expression of a feeling.
Cash Danielsen’s photographs follow his desire to reveal beauty in times of confusion and to perceive traces of suffering in times of wonder. The series “Overstimulation” questions what it means to be alive today. Could it be this part of sensitivity behind the colored surface? Because here, the photographs highlight states of over-stimulation of the senses which lead to confusion, a feeling of discomfort, affecting the physical and emotional body.
Behind these pictures and flamboyant personalities, one wonders where the artist’s part of the projection is. Isn't there a keen sensitivity that only great creativity can counterbalance?"
--Edits to article made by Cash.