CASSILS (Los Angeles/ NYC) is a Canadian transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils’ art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, and empowerment. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils’ work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment. Employing a myriad of visual tactics—outlines and silhouettes, solar exposures, retinal burns, flashes, and Rorschach devices—Cassils aims to complicate the conditions of trans* visibility in a moment of heightened violence.
Cassils has had solo exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe (NM). Walter Phillips Gallery Banff Center for Arts and Creativity (AB) HOME Manchester (UK); Station Museum of Contemporary Art (TX);, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts(AU); Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (NYC); Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PA); School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MA); Bemis Center (OH); MU Eindhoven, (NL).
Cassils’s work has been featured at the Marina Abramović Institute Takeover at Southbank Centre, London, UK; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, AZ; Oakland Museum of California, CA; Kunstpalais, Erlangen, Germany; MUCEM, Marseille, France; Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Schwules Museum, Berlin, Germany; MUCA Roma, Mexico City, Mexico; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA; and Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica. Cassils’s performances have been featured at The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; The National Theatre, London, UK; ANTI Contemporary Performance Festival, Kuopio, Finland; Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, Austria; Dark Mofo, MONA, Hobart, Tasmania; and Queer Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia. Cassils’s films have premiered at Sundance International Film Festival, Park City, UT; OUTFest, Los Angeles, CA; Institute for Contemporary Art, London, UK; Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo, Brazil; International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands; M+, at West Kowloon, Hong Kong, China; and Outsider Festival, Austin, TX for Early Career Retrospective: Cassils.
Cassils is the recipient of the USA Artist Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist, a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, Creative Capital Award, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, the National Creation Fund and Visual Artist Fellowship from the Canada Council of the Arts. Cassils’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired, The Guardian, Art Forum, and academic journals such as Performance Research, TDR: The Drama Review, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Places Journal, and October. Cassils is the subject of the monograph Cassils, published by MU Eindhoven in 2015; and is the subject of a new catalog published by The Station Museum of Contemporary Art.
Cassils is an Associate Professor in Sculpture and Integrated Practices at PRATT Institute.
Photo of Cassils by Richard Jupe.
