Heather Cassils

Heather Cassils, often referred to simply as Cassils, is a performance artist, a body builder and a personal trainer from Montreal, Canada now based in Los Angeles, United States. Their work uses the body in a sculptural fashion, integrating feminism, body art, and gay male aesthetics.

Early educational influences

In 1997 Cassils received a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax, Canada. Cassils joined the college as a painting student and via an unconventional curriculum in which, for example, nude models jumped on a trampoline during figure drawing classes, quickly became involved with video and performance. Additionally, they became involved with political and feminist work, being advised by feminist media artist Jan Peacock and conceptual artist Garry Neil Kennedy.

Upon graduating from NSCAD in 1997, Cassils moved to New York City and secured an internship at the Franklin Furnace. At that time, director Martha Wilson was taking the Franklin Furnace into the digital era. Their job was to go through old documents and Portapak videos from the 1970s and upload them onto an online archive. This allowed Cassils to gain knowledge in the history of experimental performance practice. It also provided Cassils with the resources to make their own performances and documentation. In conjunction with early exhibitions and performances at the Holland Tunnel Gallery (1998), the Limelight, and PS122, Cassils was able to assemble a strong portfolio.

Collaborative practice with the Toxic Titties

Cassils attended the MFA program at California Institute of the Arts from 2000-2002 on a highly coveted merit scholarship. At CalArts, Cassils co-founded the Los Angeles-based performance collective Toxic Titties in collaboration with Julia Steinmetz and Clover Leary, a collaboration that flourished for nearly a decade.^[1] Together they created a process oriented, and event-based practice, focused on conceptual performance. Their multidisciplinary practice generated a large body of work engaged with the problematics of identity politics.

Toxic Titties performed and exhibited nationally, at various locations such as: the Advocate Gallery (2000), Track 16 Gallery (2002), at the California Institute of the Arts (2001–02), Michael Dawson Gallery (2002), LA FreeWaves Festival (2002),^[2] Intersectional Feminisms conference at UC Riverside in Los Angeles (2002), REDCAT at the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle^[3] (2005), USC Center for Feminist Research, Los Angeles (2006), Art in General (2006), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions,^[4] Los Angeles (2008) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)^[5] San Francisco, CA (2009).

Internationally Toxic Titties exhibited at Manifesta in Frankfurt, Germany (2000), Schnitt Ausstellungsraum in Cologne, Germany (2000), Outside Field: International Festival, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City (2003) and MUCA Roma, Mexico City (2003). In collaboration with artist Dorit Margrieter, they created the 16mm film 10104 Angelo View Drive, a work set in John Lautner’s modernist Sheats-Goldstein Residence in Beverly Hills exploring the relationship between architecture and desire. This project was featured in solo exhibitions at Art Basel Miami Beach and at MUMOK, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006) as well as at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, Canada (2008).

It was during this period that the Toxic Titties' work was first featured in art historical and critical writing by Amelia Jones^[6] (Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice-Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design), Jennifer Doyle ^[7](Professor of English, University of California Riverside), Christine Ross,^[8] (Professor and James McGill Chair in Contemporary Art History in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University), José Esteban Muñoz^[9] (Professor and Chair, Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University). This critical attention appeared in publications including Tema Celeste (Nov-Dec 2002), Sex Objects: Art and The Dialectics of Desire (2006),^[10] and The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (2006).^[11]

Many of these scholars first encountered the work of the Toxic Titties when Cassils and Leary were hired to perform in Vanessa Beecroft’s VB46 at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Having infiltrated the behind the scenes process of Beecroft’s practice, they launched a parasitical performance, Beecroft Intervention (2001). Undermining power structures of identity, class, feminism and art commerce, Toxic Titties hijacked Beecroft’s piece by engaging the female performers, who had been homogenized and objectified, in critical dialogue. Their influence unionized the group and forced an increase in the cost of their labor. They documented this performance through the essay Behind Enemy Lines: Toxic Titties Infiltrate Vanessa Beecroft published in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society (2006), and reprinted in Art Metropole’s Commerce By Artists^[12] (2011).

Emerging solo career

In 2007, Cassils was awarded a merit scholarship to participate in a residency program at the Banff Center for the Arts and a Creation Grant from the Canada Council of the Arts Intra Arts department, which allowed them to create an experimental documentary and performance titled Simulation In Training. This piece investigated the theater of war present in the American mass media, and demonstrated the overlap between the military industrial complex and the Hollywood film industry.

In 2009, Cassils won the Franklin Furnace Performance Art Fund^[13] for the performance Hard Times, their first piece integrating these aesthetic, physical and political concerns. The resulting film was subsequently screened at the Asian Experimental Video Festival in Hong Kong, China, Festival Ciné à Dos in Koulikoro, Mali, at Art Cinema Zawya in Cairo, Egypt. and Cultureel tetras de Kaaij, Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

Next Cassils created the performance Tiresias, a five-hour durational performance for an exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions called Gutted^[14] (2010). During the live performance they used their body heat to melt a neoclassical Greek male torso carved out of ice, recasting the myth of Tiresias as a story of endurance and transformation. Cassils has performed Tiresias at the ANTI International Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio Finland (2012); at the FADO Performance Art Center^[15] in Toronto, Canada; at the City Of Women Festival in conjunction with The Kapelica Gallery^[16] in Ljubljana Slovenia; at the Performatorium Festival of Queer Performance,^[17] Regina, Canada (2013); and at Performance Studies International^[18] at Stanford University (2013). Most recently the piece was installed at the National Gallery of Art in Sopot, Poland (2015). Articles about Tiresias have appeared in well respected academic journals, including an essay in The Drama Review by Maurya Wickstrom,^[19] and another in Performance Research Journal by Megan Hoetger.^[20] Both journals featured images from the performance on their cover (2014).

Mid-career achievements

In 2010, Cassils was awarded a Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Artist Research Grant as part of LACE’s contribution to Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty with arts institutions across Southern California, showcasing cultural production from 1945-1980. LACE chose Cassils to make a new performance for their exhibition Los Angeles Goes Live: Exploring a Social History of Performance Art in Southern California (LAGA)^[21] in which they were invited to use LACE's archive as a springboard from which to create a new work. Cassils created Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, a large body of work that began with a six-month durational performance and generated video installations, photographs, watercolors, and a magazine. This performance is a reinterpretation of Eleanor Antin’s 1972 performance Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, in which Antin crash dieted for 45 days and documented her body daily with photographs from four vantage points. Instead Cassils used their mastery of bodybuilding and nutrition to gain 23 pounds of muscle over 23 weeks, transforming their physique into a traditionally masculine muscular form. Elements from CUTS have been exhibited at Rutgers University,^[22] the Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland,^[23] the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (2013),^[24] as well as at SOMArts ^[25] San Francisco, and MU Art Space,^[26] Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2014).

Cassils also collaborated with photographer and makeup artist Robin Black to create Advertisement: Homage to Benglis, in which Cassils staged a series of self-empowered representations of trans embodiment, substituting a ripped masculine physique for Benglis’s double-ended phallus.^[27] This piece received critical acclaim and became the subject articles in the LA Weekly (2011),^[28] and X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly (2012).^[29] It is a key subject of Lianne McTavish’s book Feminist Figure Girl Look Hot While You Fight The Patriarchy (2015),^[30] and was featured in the publication Art and Queer Culture by Richard Meyer and Catherine Lord (2013).^[31] Advertisement: Homage to Benglis was featured in Cassils's solo exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, BODY OF WORK, and it is currently on view and being used as the key art for an exhibition in Berlin at the Schwules Museum* and Deutsches Historisches Museum called Homosexualities (2015).^[32] The film Fast Twitch// Slow Twitch, also part of the CUTS series, was screened at Moving Image Fair,^[33][34] and the ICA in London, UK in 2013,^[35] as well as at screenings at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena,^[36] the This Is What I Want Festival in San Francisco (2012)^[37] the Dirty Looks On Location Festival in NY, and Festival Everybody’s Perfect in Geneva, Switzerland.

In 2012 Cassils commenced a new body of work called Becoming An Image, originally conceived as a site-specific work for the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, the oldest active LGBTQ archive in the United States. Cassils delivers a series of kicks and blows to a 2000-pound block of clay in total darkness. The spectacle is only illuminated by a photographer's flash which burns the image into the viewer’s retina, raising questions of witnessing, documentation, memory and evidence. In 2013, this piece was exhibited in an exhibition called Material Traces: Time and Gesture in Contemporary Art curated by Amelia Jones^[38] and appeared at The Edgy Woman Festival in Montreal, Canada.^[39] It was also performed at the National Theater Studio as part of the SPILL International Performance Festival in London,^[40] and the Fierce Festival in Birmingham, UK.

In 2013 it became the cornerstone of Cassils's first solo exhibition BODY OF WORK,^[41] at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York. Becoming an Image was subsequently performed in Zagreb, Croatia^[42] as well as in University galleries across the United States. The work was on the cover of Art Journal^[43] and written about in an article by Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy.^[44] The piece was reviewed positively on the cover of the arts section of The Guardian newspaper in London, UK (2013),^[45] as well as in publications including The Huffington Post,^[46] The Daily Beast,^[47] Artsy Editorial, ^[48] and C File Magazine.^[49] Additionally, Amelia Jones published writings on Cassils's solo practice in Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres, co-edited with Gabrielle Cody (2015).^[50] In 2014 Cassils mounted their first Canadian solo exhibition at Trinity Square Video^[51] in conjunction with Pleasure Dome^[52] and V tape. Their sold out performances of Becoming an Image received national coverage on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).^[53]

In 2015 Cassils won a Creative Capital Grant to make a new series of sculptures called The Resilience of the 20% or the Monument Project,^[54] cast from remnants of the performance Becoming An Image, in which I use their mixed martial arts training to beat a 2000-pound obelisk of modeling clay to the point of exhaustion. In addition to the Creative Capital Grant, Cassils won numerous prestigious grants and awards including a California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship (2012),^[55] and a two-year Canada Council for the Arts, Long Term Assistance Grant to Visual Artists (2012-2014). Cassils was a Fellows of Contemporary Art nominee (2013,) and was awarded a MOTHA Art Awards (Museum of Transgender History & Art) for Best Solo Exhibition of 2013, for their show at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.^[56] This solo show was also reviewed in Artforum Magazine in the December Best of 2013 issue. In 2014, Cassils won the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship^[57] and first ever appointed ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art.^[58]

Incendiary, Cassils first European solo show was at MU in the Netherlands in 2015.^[59] This exhibition was the largest and most ambitious to date and featured live performances and the resulting performative objects. Cassils first artist book was published by IDEA press in conjunction with the exhibition, and distributed internationally.

Collaborations

Along with Clover Leary and Julia Steinmetz, Cassils formed Toxic Titties, a feminist art collective based in Los Angeles. The Toxic Titties are known for their intervention in the work of Vanessa Beecroft. Toxic Titties infiltrated Beecroft's installation VB46 in 2001 and later spoke of their experiences in the performance.^[60]

Cassils features in the music video for Lady Gaga's song "Telephone" from Gaga's 2009 album The Fame Monster.

Cassils choreographed a music video by LCD Sound System (commercial for Gillette) directed by Michele Gondry.^[61] Cassils' job was to match the athlete's movements with the beats and sounds the musicians wanted to generate, creating a physical symphony.

Cassils also won a competition to create the album cover for Black Sabbath's single "God is Dead?". Cassils collaborated with designer Cathy Davies on this project.

Awards

• 2009 Franklin Furnace Performance Art Fund^[62]
• 2012 (CCF) California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship^[63]
• 2013 MOTHA Art Awards (Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art) for Best Solo Exhibition of 2013^[64]
• 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship^[65]
• 2014 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art^[66]
• 2015 Creative Capital Visual Artist Award^[67]

References

Further reading

• Grey, Kris. Fire In The Belly: Trans Artist Cassils Immolates For Art. Huffington Post Gay Voices. June 2015.
• Teplitzky, Alex. Cassils Takes On Fire and Ice. Creative Capital. The Lab. June 2015.
• Yeung, Peter. The Artists Subverting the Gender Binary. Dazed & Confused Magazine. December 2014.
• Kellaway, Mitch. Racy, Experimental Art from the Transgender Vanguard, Advocate. August 2014.
• Chun, Kimberly. Projected Personae: Show Focuses On Human Body As Art Medium. San Francisco Chronicle. July 23, 2014.
• Brooks, Katherine. A Survey Of Queer Feminist Artists Who Are Challenging Today's Body Oppression. The Huffington Post, June, 2014.
• Frank, Priscilla. 10 TransgenderArtists Who Are Changing the Landscape of Contemporary Art. The Huffington Post, April 2014.
• Interview with Jian Ghomeshi, Q, CBC Radio, February 2014.
• Albracht, Amy. Clay: Heather Cassils’ Becoming An Image. C File Magazine. November 2013.
• Friezzell, Nell. Heather Cassils: The Transgendered Body Builder Attacks Heaps of Clay. The Guardian UK. 2013.
• Artsy Editorial. Bodybuilder Artist Heather Cassils Channels Lynda Benglis and Eleanor Antin. Artsy. October 2013.
• Gopnick, Blake. The Terminatrix. The Daily Beast. October 2013.
• Grey, Kris. Cassils: Body of Work. Original Plumbing Magazine. September 2013. Cassils, Heather. Bashing Binaries -- Along With 2,000 Pounds of Clay. Huffington: Post Gay Voices. September 2013.
• Crary, David. Jason Collins' Coming Out Breaks New Ground For Gay Rights Trend. Huffington Post. April 2013.
• Mortimer, Dora. Live Art Review: Becoming An Image Diva Magazine. UK. April 2013.
• Jankovic, Bojana. Becoming an Image at National Theatre Studio. Exeunt Magazine, UK. April 2013.
• LGBT Athletes: 27 Players Who Have Come Out Of The Closet, Huffington Post. April 2013.
• Amelia. Material Traces: Process, Matter, and Interrelationality in Contemporary Art Catalogue. Concordia University, Montreal, Spring 2013.
• Transgender Day of Remembrance 2012: 50 Transgender Icons. Huffington Post. November 2012.
• LGBT History Month: 30 LGBT Artists and Performers to Follow. Huffington Post. October 2012.
• Yablonsky, Linda. California Dreamin', Artforum Magazine. October 2011.
• Wagley, Catherine. Heather Cassils Gets Ripped for LACE Performance Art Show, LA Weekly, September 2011.

Publications

• David Getsy, The Image of Becoming: Heather Cassils’s Allegories of Transformation (Idea Press, 2015)^[1]
• Julia Steinmetz, Cassils: Inextinguishable Fire (Idea Press, 2015)
• David Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2015)
• Ameila Jones, Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres, coedited with Gabrielle Cody (London: Routledge: 20152013)
• Lianne McTavish, Feminist Figure Girl Look Hot While You Fight The Patriarchy. State University of New York Press. 2015
• Eliza Steinbock, "Photographic Flashes: On imaging Trans Violence in Heather Cassils’ Durational Art". Photography & Culture, Volume 7—Issue 3, (November 2014): 253–268
• Maurya Wickstrom, "Desire and Karios: Cassils Terisias." The Drama Review (TDR), (Winter 2014): 46-55
• Megan Hoetger. "Tiresias by Heather Cassils." Performance Research Journal, Vol. 19, Issue 3.(Fall, 201): 58-59
• Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy. "Queer Formalisim: Jennifer Doyel and David Getsy in Conversation." Art Journal 72, No 4 (Winter 2014): 58-71
• Richard Meyer and Catherine Lord, Art and Queer Culture, Phaidon Press, London, UK
• Megan Hoetger, X Tra Magazine "Re-performance: History as and Experience to Be Had; Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970-1983; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles," Fall 2012 / Volume 15, no. 1.
• "Behind Enemy Lines: Toxic Titties Infiltrate Vanassa Beecroft", Heather Cassils, Clover Leary, Julia Steinmetz. Luis Jacob, Commerce by Artists, Art Metropole, pp 318–335
• "Behind Enemy Lines: Toxic Titties Infiltrate Vanassa Beecroft", Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Heather Cassils, Clover Leary, Julia Steinmetz. University of Chicago

External links

• http://www.heathercassils.com/

1. ↑ "The Image of Becoming: Heather Cassils's Allegories of Transformation". Academia. Retrieved 7 September 2016.