bio
Cassity Eileen Columbo is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, sculpture, installation, and writing. Her practice is rooted in the belief that to understand one's present and one's purpose; you must first come to an understanding of with what came before.
At the center of her work is the family archive: photographs, home videos, undeveloped film, sentimental objects, letters, and the silences between them. Over several years she has collected, traveled to, and physically inhabited the sites her family left behind; grave sites, childhood homes, rodeo grounds, and rooms she has never entered but somehow recognizes. The archive is not treated as evidence. It is treated as a living material.
Her sculptural practice grows from the same impulse; an insistence on making the intangible physical, on giving grief and memory and connection a body in space. Working intuitively and often in a state of productive chaos, she builds forms that reach into the architecture around them, that suspend themselves between surfaces, that hold light differently depending on where you stand. The process is never linear. Materials are introduced, layered, cut apart, reassembled. What survives is what insisted on surviving. She understands this as a form of listening to the archive, to the work itself, to the people and histories asking to be acknowledged.
Weaving runs through both dimensions of her practice, not just as a technique but as a way of thinking. To weave archival photographs together is to propose that fragmented histories can be held in relation to one another without being flattened into a single story. The ruptures stay visible. The joins are part of the meaning.
Her work operates on the conviction that time is not linear. Drawing on Indigenous frameworks of nonlinear time, oral tradition, and ancestral memory, she understands the archive not as a document of the past but as a portal; a place where past, present, and future collapse into one another. She approaches her practice the way Shawn Wilson describes research as ceremony: circling, listening, returning, becoming lost and finding the way home.
Grief is present in this work, but so is curiosity, tenderness, and an insistence on care. She asks who gets remembered, and how, and by whom. She asks what we pass down without meaning to, and what we can choose to transform. She is interested in what photographs hold that memory cannot and what memory holds that photographs cannot.
Her practice is in conversation with land; its history, its erasure, and the knowledge it carries. She is attentive to the ways colonial structures sever people from place, from ancestry, and from reciprocal relationships with the earth. Her work refuses the dominant culture's demand that art be legible, commodifiable, or resolved.
What was never told still has somewhere to go. She is not trying to recover what was lost; she is learning to live inside the not knowing, and make art there. Cassity earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she double majored in Photography and Sculpture. She grew up in Quartz Hill, California.