SOIL FOR HEALING

Band of Vices is honored to present Soil for Healing, the second solo exhibition with the gallery by Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Victoria Cassinova. This new body of work meets grief and the spiritual on the same plane—and then tenderly transforms both. Cassinova’s practice is rooted in alchemy: she composts the discarded and the painful into fertile ground. Even the years of dried oil paint she scrapes from her palettes are gathered, embedded, and reborn on the canvas. In her hands, what might have been refuse becomes relief—matter made meaningful.

Working across oil painting, mixed media and graphite, Cassinova creates visual narratives that feel both excavated and constructed. The surfaces are rich, textural, and intentionally unsettled—what she calls “controlled chaos.” Formally, the work converses with neo-expressionism, realism, and surrealism; philosophically, it nods to Jung and the subconscious. The result is a field where the body, psyche, and spirit converge, and where integration—rather than erasure—becomes the path to repair.

This exhibition is also courageously personal. Following the tragic loss of her younger brother to suicide, Cassinova embarked on an unflinching inquiry into how we metabolize pain—psychologically, somatically, and spiritually. The works neither sensationalize nor subdue grief; they hold it, transform it, and invite us to do the same. Soil for Healing proposes that mourning can be a portal, that facing the shadow is a liberatory act, and that beauty is not the opposite of truth but its companion.