Cass Jaillette

Cass Jaillette was born on May 11, 2002 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina to a young military family on the move. From Italy to Germany and then back to the United States, she'd spend the majority of her childhood in Savannah, Georgia and fondly calls it home. While tumultuous, Jaillette's childhood served as a cultivation for the majority of his artistic inspirations. Themes of religious deconstruction, queer identity, abuse survival, and mental health are expressed primarily through her photographic works, poetry, etchings, and drawings. Jaillette focuses on primarily black and white artwork with occasional bursts of color that play within the realms of dream-like compositions. Whether in color or in black and white, the constant themes of contrasting lighting and weighted compositions is what establishes her artistic style in combination with macabre subject matters. 

Jaillette is currently a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design as a Documentary Photography Major and plans on pursuing Creative Writing post-graduation. In combination, the usage of photographic artwork along with written poetry has already been established but will be more so with book publications to come. As of 2024, Jaillette is working on a series called "Heard" that is a documentary/fine art perspective on her time as a line cook in the food service/customer service industry. The goal of the series is to raise awareness of the often inhuman labor conditions a lot of American service workers have been dealing with in modern era. From lack of unionization to the struggles of balancing sometimes as many as 3 jobs at once just to afford living expenses in the United States, the labor force is and has been gravely abused. Jaillette, while only having been in the industry for a few years, aims to help bring awareness and solutions to the issues at hand and utilize his creative outlets to do so in help with organizations local to Savannah and anyone willing to help the cause. 

I'm in love with the cycle of life and how Death claims everything that lives, whether animate or inanimate. Images in my head often come to me, cheese-ily enough, in dreams and in poems. These ideas and visions have to leave my mind and enter the physical world or I will become obsessed with letting them go. While I was younger and going through a rough period of time, I became haunted by a sleep paralysis demon that changed my artistic journey forever. I made sculptures, drew hundreds of drawings, and had incessant nightmares about this demoness with long antelope horns and long black hair- it was driving me insane. I expressed her image through my art and attached it to letting go of all of the pain I was feeling at the time in order to feel free of everything that troubled me. She went away when I had made enough, when I had let go of enough of it all, and ever since then that's become the method to my madness. I take what troubles me and I transform it into art that seals those things way from me for good; I let Death take what it needs from me and it benefits us both. 

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