I’m Losing Your Mind 

Curator: Here we have Cassidy Rae Marietta's intriguing mixed-media artwork, "I’m Losing Your Mind." Editor: Well, my first thought is…anxiety. The colors are warm but the composition feels incredibly tense. So much going on—it’s almost claustrophobic. What’s your take? Curator: Immediately, I see a potent symbolic dance. The skeleton, intertwined with a figure in repose…it reads to me as an allegory for mortality embracing life, the ephemeral nature of consciousness. It's an ancient theme, certainly, yet here it is, re-imagined. Editor: See, I’m looking at the material. It's mixed media but with a consistent style, a linear obsessiveness that reminds me of late-period art nouveau, even psychedelic poster art. The ground of little circles—are they fruit slices? And those linear tangles around the figures? It's painstaking, really highlighting the artist's hand and her labor in image-making. Curator: The orange slices read to me of cyclical, generative power - like, nature's building blocks or atoms of creative force. The intertwined lines evoke a sense of emotional confusion and internal struggle. Look how they seem to bind and restrict. Editor: And that's what really sells it for me - how physical the emotion feels. It doesn’t sit still, it isn’t just symbolic or abstract. It uses very familiar, physical properties like color and shape to get to our nerves and stay in our vision as active work of anxiety. Curator: It could signify being consumed or entangled, even haunted, by your own thoughts - or indeed, your inevitable fate. The mind becoming unmoored in time. There's definitely a primal symbolism here. Editor: For me, it makes me question the function of the objects the artist decides to show as components of their visual art. Each curve, each mark of their making, works to communicate what is normally lost with modern reproduction of work like paintings. There are details to study, to get stuck in and observe to extract their meaning. Curator: A provocative visual riddle, indeed, open to our individual interpretations about our relationships with selfhood. Editor: Absolutely. It’s the layering, the construction, that really hits home, making me feel every part of that anxiety.