I'm looking for an inventive strategy that pushes back on the scrutinizing and surveying gaze of the trans body. This work is a contestation of that gaze while still bringing forward visibility for each other.
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 LGBTQIA+ violence, representation, struggle, survival, empowerment, and systems of care. 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 excavates historical contexts to examine the present moment.
Cassils has upcoming solo exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe, Walter Phillips Gallery, and Banff Center for Art and Creativity. They had recent solo exhibitions at HOME Manchester; Station Museum of Contemporary Art; Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands.
They are the recipient of the Creativity and Free Expression grant from the Ford Foundation (2023), the National Creation Fund (2022), 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 Artists 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, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Wired, The Guardian, TDR, Performance Research, Art Journal, and was the subject of the monograph Cassils, published by MU Eindhoven (2015). Their new catalog, Solutions, is published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, TX (2020). Cassils's work was recently acquired by the Victoria Albert Museum, London; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and the Leslie-Lohman Museum.
Cassils is an Associate Professor in Sculpture and Integrated Practices at Pratt Institute.