Natural elements such as trees and clouds are heavily featured as imagery and motifs in Nate Cassie’s work. Cassie’s Inversion series centers around the idea of specific moments of time captured through a digital photograph, then combined with a traditional printmaking process. In old times, an image was captured on a plate that could be inked and printed by pressure through an etching press. Nowadays, digital offers us another way forward to soulful prints. Modern inkjet printers let us make a transparent positive, which is then placed against a plate covered with an emulsion of photo-initiating polymer. Exposure to UV light transfers the image to the plate where it can be “etched” with water. The artist used a single exposure with transparency and printed a la poupee (stumps of rags). Trees represent connectivity, branching out, and natural patterns which tell a unique history of the different geographic locations they are captured at around the world, but particularly in Central Texas, where the artist has lived and worked for 30 years. Austin Inversion (White Ash) was taken at Lake Austin, TX in November 2022.


These digitally produced photolithographs combined with traditional lithography made from
photographs taken in various locations around the world of singular, stoic trees. In the words of
curator Lyle Williams, “These prints capture not only the specific patterns in which the trees have
grown but communicate something that we might call the character of these organisms; the
etchings in a sense are portraits of these sentinels that have stood in our landscape for centuries
watching over the relatively transient lives and histories of mankind… A print of an ash tree looks
like an old photographic negative, like it belongs to another time; its branches form familiar
patterns over the surface of the composition… This post-pandemic work reminds us that we don’t
know what the future holds.” These more solid, sentient structures in their inversions in some way
mimic the clouds’ organic fractal-like structure, but they also speak to a much longer history and
to solidity and strength in the face of adversity.