In a time of lockdown and quarantines, of fascism and propaganda, we need reason and action to be supported by visions of change. Cassils discusses artistic and performative tactics uniquely suited for our time. Reflecting on ten years of practice where they carve out strategies for trans representation, they discuss tactics to educate, engage and agitate while attempting to balance and center love, community and relevant action.
CASSILS is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils’s art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle and survival. 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’s work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment.
Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands.
They are the recipient of a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist (2020), a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2019), a United States Artist Fellowship (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship and a COLA Grant (2017) and a Creative Capital Award (2015). They have received the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, and numerous Visual Artist Fellowships from the Canada Council of the Arts. Their work has been featured in New York Times, Boston Globe, Artfourm, Hyperallergic, Wired, The Guardian, TDR, Performance Research, Art Journal and was the subject of the monograph Cassils published by MU Eindhoven 92015) and their new catalogue Solutions, is published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, TX (2020).
In a time of lockdown and quarantines, of fascism and propaganda, we need reason and action to be supported by visions of change. Cassils discusses artistic and performative tactics uniquely suited for our time. Reflecting on ten years of practice where they carve out strategies for trans representation, they discuss tactics to educate, engage and agitate while attempting to balance and center love, community and relevant action.