CASSILS 2020 CASSILS 2020 SHORT BIO
CASSILS is a gender nonconforming visual artist working in live performance, sculpture, photography, installation, sound design and film. Contemplating the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle and survival, Cassils makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. 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, their work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment.
Solo exhibitions include Banff Center for the Arts, Perth Museum of Contemporary Art, Perth, Australia; The Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands; and Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Canada. Cassils’s work has been featured at 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, the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, Creative Capital Award, 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 catalogue published by The Station Museum of Contemporary Art. CASSILS 2020
Artist: Cassils SHAME #DEFUNDHATE Los Angeles Geo Group Headquarters, July 3, 2020 Performance Still: Robin Black, Part of In Plain Sight a coalition of 80 artists fighting immigrant detention and the culture of incarceration conceived of by Cassils and rafa esparza
LINK TO IN PLAIN SIGHT TRAILER CASSILS 2020
Artist: Patrice Cullors CARE NOT CAGES Los Angeles County Jail, July 3, 2020 Performance Still: Chris Mastro, Part of In Plain Sight a coalition of 80 artists fighting immigrant detention and the culture of incarceration conceived of by Cassils and rafa esparza CASSILS 2020
Artist: Bamby Salcedo STOP CRIMMIGRATION NOW Los Angeles Field Office, July 3, 2020 Performance Still: David McNew, Part of In Plain Sight a coalition of 80 artists fighting immigrant detention and the culture of incarceration conceived of by Cassils and rafa esparza CASSILS 2020
Cassils Alchemic No. 1, 2017 photo: Cassils with Robin Black CASSILS 2020
Cassils Alchemic No. 5, 2017 photo: Cassils with Robin Black CASSILS 2020
Cassils Alchemic No. 3, 2017 photo: Cassils with Robin Black CASSILS 2020
Cassils Alchemic No. 2, 2017 photo: Cassils with Robin Black CASSILS 2020
Cassils Resilience of the 20% Melt/Carve/Forge, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia), 2016
LINK TO MONUMENT PUSH TRAILER CASSILS 2020
Cassils Resilience of the 20% Melt/Carve/Forge, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia), 2016 CASSILS 2020
Cassils Resilience of the 20% Monumental, Feldman Gallery, NY, 2017 CASSILS 2020
Cassils Pissed, Installation Image No. 9 Monumental, Ronald Feldman Gallery, NYC, 2017 photo: Cassils with Vince Ruvolo
LINK TO VICE NEWS / HBO COVERAGE CASSILS 2020
Cassils Solutions Installation No. 10 Solutions, Station Museum, Houston, Texas, 2018 photo: Cassils with Alejandro Santiago CASSILS 2020
Cassils Portrait Pissed: Collection Day, Los Angeles, 2017 photo: Robyn Beck CASSILS 2020
Cassils Becoming An Image, Performance Still No. 1 National Theater Studio, SPILL Festival, London, 2013 photo: Cassils with Manuel Vason
LINK TO BECOMING AN IMAGE TRAILER CASSILS 2020
Cassils Becoming An Image, Performance Still No. 3 Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth International Performance Festival, 2019 photo: Cassils with Manuel Vason CASSILS 2020
Cassils Becoming An Image, Performance Still No. 4 ONE National Archives, Transactivations, Los Angeles, 2012 photo: Cassils with Eric Charles CASSILS 2020
Cassils Becoming An Image, Performance Still No. 2 Incendiary, MU, Eindoven, Netherlands, 2015 photo: Cassils with Rem Van Den Bosch CASSILS 2020
Cassils Inextinguishable Fire, No. 4 National Theater Studio, SPILL Festival, London, 2015 photo: Cassils with Guido Mencari
LINK TO INEXTINGUISHABLE FIRE TRAILER CASSILS 2020
Cassils Inextinguishable Fire, No. 8 National Theater Studio, SPILL Festival, London, 2015 photo: Cassils with Guido Mencari CASSILS 2020
Cassils Encapsulated Breaths, Installation Image No. 1 Solutions, Stantion Museum, Houston, Texas, 2018 photo: Cassils with Alejandro Santiago CASSILS 2020
Cassils Encapsulated Breaths, Installation Image No. 7 Solutions, Stantion Museum, Houston, Texas, 2018 photo: Cassils with Alejandro Santiago CASSILS 2020
Cassils Tiresias, Video Still No. 6 Performance for Camera, 2013 photo: Cassils with Clover Leary
LINK TO TIRESIAS TRAILER CASSILS 2020
Cassils Tiresias, Video Still No. 7 Performance for Camera, 2013 photo: Cassils with Clover Leary CASSILS 2020
Cassils Advertisement: Homage to Benglis, 2011 photo: Cassils with Robin Black
LINK TO FAST TWITCH // SLOW TWITCH CASSILS 2020
Cassils Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, Timelapse (Front), 2011 Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, Timelapse (Back), 2011 Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, Timelapse (Right), 2011 Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, Timelapse (Left), 2011 9/2/2020 David J. Getsy on Cassils - Artforum International
9/2/2020CASSILS David J. Getsy on Cassils - Artforum International 2020 PRESS TABLE OF CONTENTS PRINT FEBRUARY 2018
SLANT CASSILS TABLE OF CONTENTS PRINT FEBRUARY 2018
SLANT CASSILS
Cassils, Fountain, 2017. Performance view, September 16, 2017, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York. Background: Cassils, PISSED, 2017. Photo: Vince Ruvolo.
MAKE NO MISTAKE: Cassils’s work comes from rage. PISSED, the centerpiece of their exhibition “Monu-mental”at Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York this past autumn,
Cassils,testifie Fountains to tha,t 2017 ang.e Performancer. Exhibite dview, as aSeptember massive 16,gla 2017,ss cu bRonalde con Feldmantaining Gallery,two h uNewndr York.ed gallons of Background: Cassils, PISSED, 2017. Photo: Vince Ruvolo.
https://www.artforum.com/print/201802/cassils-73661 1/11 MAKE NO MISTAKE: Cassils’s work comes from rage. PISSED, the centerpiece of their exhibition “Monu-mental”at Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York this past autumn, testifies to that anger. Exhibited as a massive glass cube containing two hundred gallons of
https://www.artforum.com/print/201802/cassils-73661 1/11 9/2/2020CASSILS David J. Getsy on Cassils - Artforum International 2020 PRESS
the artist’s urine surrounded by the containers used to collect and carry it, PISSED addressed a transgender political struggle via a formal language at once confrontational and uncompromisingly austere.The work was sparked by the Trump administration’s spiteful, reactionary decision to rescindan Obama-era executive order that endorsed the rights of transgender students to use the bathroom of the gender they know themselves to be. In response, Cassils began collecting all the urine they passed since that date. Refusing to keep out of sight, the artist undertook this months-long lifework as a confrontational transgression of the conventional lines between public and private, and the resulting installation offered a defiant material presence that resists the ways in which “privacy” has been weaponized against transgender lives.
The fearmongering about bathrooms hinges on compelling trans people to make themselves visible as a means of surveilling and targeting them. This motive is masked as a defense of privacy, the terms of which are defined, narrowly, through the presumption that gender is merely (and strictly) binary, and through the belief that those binary genders need to be segregated because of the dangers of heterosexual lust. Any “right to privacy,” however, excludes anyone who does not fit binary preconceptions, and this exclusion is enforced by institutions that defend the myth that there are only two static genders. Bathrooms have become one of the most visible symbols and sites of the structural disenfranchisement of transgender people. PISSED makes the case that bodily processes are already public and political.
Cassils speaks to the politics affecting transgender lives while striving to convey those politics without exposing the trans body to voyeuristic examination.
With PISSED, Cassils wryly appropriated the formal vocabulary of Minimalist abstraction, the rule-based structures of Conceptual performance, and the tropes of institutional critique. The work was a daily disruption for the public spaces through which Cassils moved during nearly seven months of urine collection, carrying a conspicuous container with them at all times. The material needs of their body were consequently made both public and social throughout the months leading up to the work’s display. This
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performance work manifested its protest as quotidian visibility, a literal refusal to allow this issue to recede from view—not for a single day. When Cassils was traveling by air or out of the country, friends took on the responsibility of storing their own urine in the artist’s stead. What was on view in the gallery is an evidentiary residue of these daily acts of defiance and solidarity, and its final form is built on the thousands of conversations Cassils had with friends, strangers, authorities, and acquaintances about the work and its political significance.Cassils’s artistic labor included shouldering the burden of having these conversations (which ranged from the supportive to the skeptical to the antagonistic), as well as enduring the increased scrutiny this performance of resistance brought to them, their body, and its processes.
Cassils, Alchemic No. 1, 2017, ink-jet print, 30 × 30". From the series “Alchemized,” 2017. Photo: Cassils with Robin
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For over fifteen years, Cassils’s work in performance, installation, and video has tackled the complicated politics of transgender visibility and its intertwinement with the politics of form. They use their own body as material, transforming it through training, nutrition, and the acquisition of athletic skills, while also exploring the body’s mediation via photography, video, sound, and sculpture. In some performances and photographs, Cassils has defiantly exposed their body, knowing this will solicit viewers’ intrusive gazes and suffering the voyeuristic objectification that many viewers unquestionably perform. The artist does this to short-circuit the lurid, diagnostic fascination that has historically shadowed the visibility of the transgender body. Cassils’s work incites voyeurism to subvert it.
“Monumental” situated PISSED within the broader context of this practice of resistance, juxtaposing the work with objects related to Becoming an Image, 2012–. This ongoing performance centers on Cassils’s combat with a two-thousand-pound clay monolith whose originally clean-lined, geometric form has been transformed into a record of the many punches and kicks that have impacted its surface. The audience views it in the dark, surrounded by the sounds of Cassils’s exertions. Flashes of light from a photographer’s camera allow brief glimpses of Cassils during their attack on this form, leaving viewers with retinal burn rather than the ability to stare at the performer’s nude body. The exhibition at Ronald Feldman included some of the photographs taken during these performances, as well as the monument Resilience of the 20%, 2016, a bronze cast of the battered clay remnant that obliquely attests to the survival and strength of transgender people in a climate of violence against them. Also on view was documentation of the important performance Monument Push, 2017, organized with the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha. Here, a group pushed the bronze sculpture through town to sites of resistance and to places where violence against marginalized peoples had occurred. In addition to establishing a platform for public conversations about the suppressed violence of the city’s past, Monument Push created an indexical record of the effort of those who moved it through the streets of Omaha, the bronze accumulating marks of patination and wear.The work recalls Francis Alÿs’s well-known Paradox of Praxis I, 1997, for which he pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City as it gradually melted away, but Monument Push is less reflexive, more overtly embedded not only in the
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history of art (Alÿs’s work having been widely construed as both a parody of and an elegy for Minimalism) but also in the history of politics, of gender, of the specific place in which the work was situated. And Cassils’s performance gets more difficult as it proceeds. The weight does not lessen. If anything, it seems to get heavier. If Alÿs stages the deliquescence of history, Cassils emphasizes its obdurate refusal to go away, or to transform itself into elegant abstraction. Abstraction in Monument Push is not elegant, and it is not an escape from anything.
Cassils, Becoming an Image Performance Still, No. 3 (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Historic Casting Hall), 2016, ink-jet print, 20 × 30". Photo: Cassils with Zachary Hartzell.
In all of their multistage works, which move from performance to sculpture and installation, Cassils never allows the viewer merely to aestheticize the experience. Visitors did not contemplate PISSED in silence; emanating from the speakers in the room was the recorded testimony of the Virginia school board and the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals regarding Gavin Grimm, the high school student who sued his school for his right
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to use the appropriate bathroom. Much of the testimony is negative, and this looping two- hour audio component immersed viewers in the hateful opinions aired in Grimm’s presence during the legal proceedings. These disembodied voices of ignorance made it impossible to see Cassils’s cube, or the seriality of the containers, in merely formal terms, ensuring that the bodily and political urgency of the work was present and visceral. Sound plays a similar role in Cassils’s video installation Inextinguishable Fire, 2007–15, in which viewers hear the labored breath of the artist as they are engulfed in flames (while wearing a fire-retardant suit), and in Becoming an Image, where the artist’s breathing can be heard for the duration of the piece, while their body is only fitfully seen in the camera’s flashes.
Across their works, Cassils uses such fragmented or distilled evocations of bodies both to activate physical empathy and to circumvent the visual scrutiny that trans people endure. This is also the case with their use of abstraction (be it in the Minimalist cube or the mottled form of Resilience of the 20%). Cassils’s work results from a sustained attempt to speak to the larger politics affecting transgender lives while, at the same time, striving to convey those politics without exposing the trans body to voyeuristic examination. In conjunction, these tactics derive from Cassils’s understanding that no one body can represent the diversity and complexity of all trans lives. While Cassils uses their own body in their performances, they strategically employ abstraction to avoid the presumption of speaking (or standing) for all. Instead, they offer works that—like the traces of touch on the abstract monument or the disembodied voices of the Grimm trials—attempt to open up the complexity of trans experience while calling for visceral identification and political reflection from all viewers.
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View of “Cassils: Monumental,” Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York. Background: Inextinguishable Fire, 2007–15. Hanging: Encapsulated Breaths, 2017. Photo: Vince Ruvolo.
At the same time, there are moments when Cassils does use their own body in their performance, to visually confront the viewer. Rarely, however, do they offer unfettered visual access to their body. This relates to their long-standing engagement with histories of feminist art, and Cassils builds on and cites the precedents of such artists as Eleanor Antin and Lynda Benglis, both of whom made works that also bravely displayed their bodies to critique the history of representation and its gendered politics. Pivoting between such feminist body art and the capacities of abstraction and fragmentation, Cassils challenges us with the defiant presence of their body. Exposing the artist to the viewer’s gaze, such work nevertheless both makes manifest and resists the violence that such visibility can incite. We see this, for example, in “Alchemized,” 2017, a series of photographs of Cassils in which their body is covered in gold. These pictures push the body toward abstraction through tight cropping and the monochrome gilt. They invite the gaze but also mock it by turning the spectacularized body into a precious metal—a fragment of a gold statue that,
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like the famous Oscar statuette, is streamlined to a form that is not easily gendered. While indexing Cassils’s body, the photographs, like Becoming an Image, also prevent full visual access to it.
Cassils, Monument Push, 2017. Performance view, April 29, 2017, Omaha. Photo: Cassils and Alison Kelly.
Such recourses to abstraction, bodily evocation through sound, or fragmentation are necessary for Cassils’s project and politics. No, abstraction is not an escape—but it can be a method of protection or evasion when easy legibility is dangerous or intrusive. There needs to be space both for confrontational politics and for the equally political tactics of nondisclosure and intended unrecognizability. Cassils stages these dual necessities by making overtly political work that does not merely offer itself up to the viewer’s wish to see —that is, to identify and to categorize. Their deployment of Minimalist and abstract forms (as well as their vexing of the easy view of the transgender body) is a challenge to the demand that transgender people make themselves visible for everyone else.
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At the opening of “Monumental,” in the performance Fountain, 2017, Cassils critically enacted these ideas. Surrounded by the containers and facing the glass cube, they stood (clothed) on a tall pedestal. They drank water constantly and would, on occasion, urinate into another container, to be added to the cube. Attendees waited curiously for this event over the two hours the performance went on. It was a sympathetic crowd, but there was still an anxious buzz in the room when it appeared that the urination was about to happen. This was, in the end, another of Cassils’s tactical contradictions. Cassils capitalized on the fascination with the vulnerable act of urinating (and, by extension, with the transgender body) to compel the audience to stare at the artist. For this limited time, Cassils was the monument, high above the crowd. All looked up and waited, vigilant. Cassils understood the audience’s gaze (both intrusive and sympathetic) and solicited it as a means of entraining them in a group performance of witnessing and, ultimately, of solidarity.
Cassils, Fountain, 2017. Performance view, September 16, 2017, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York. Background: Cassils, PISSED, 2017. Photo: Vince Ruvolo.
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Cassils’s works are protests. They are based in anger and defiance, and they struggle with the realities of the ways in which transgender people are surveilled and controlled. Cassils insists on recognition but refuses to be objectified. The seeming divergences of the works’ visual strategies—from spectacular body performance to cerebral abstraction—are required to address today’s political realities, when transgender lives are commodified, instrumentalized, and policed for others’ comfort. The double bind in political attacks on transgender visibility hinges on the paradoxical demands of being both out of sight and readily identifiable, and Cassils’s monuments attest to the many ways in which that visual contradiction is endured and resisted.
David J. Getsy, Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is the author of Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale University Press, 2015) and is completing a book on Scott Burton’s performance art of the 1970s.
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9/2/2020 Cassils: Transgender Artist Goes to Extremes - The New York Times https://nyti.ms/1kEGat4
SPOTLIGHT Cassils: Transgender Artist Goes to Extremes
By Stephen Heyman
Nov. 18, 2015
Cassils melting an ice sculpture. Clover Leary, Courtesy of Cassils The Canadian transgender artist Cassils specializes in physically demanding performances that often require intense training regimens to transform the artist’s form into that of a bodybuilder or a mixed martial artist.
“I see the body as a social sculpture,” says Cassils, whose work has critiqued the pursuit of an unsustainable physique or the difficulty of representing violence in art. One of Cassils’ first major performances required the artist to stand still, nude, for five hours flush against an ice sculpture of a neoclassical male bust until it melted from the artist’s body heat.
Cassils’s more recent work has been even more provocative. This month, for the Spill Festival at London’s National Theater, Cassils was set on fire for 14 seconds, a “static burn” considered particularly dangerous by the stunt coordinators who trained and advised the artist. The piece, “Inextinguishable Fire,” required Cassils not to inhale (to keep from scorching the esophagus) and to wear a freezing fireproof suit that induces hypothermia (to avoid perspiration, which would otherwise boil on the surface of the skin).
Feats like these have led to increasing exposure for the Los Angeles-based artist. This summer, the MU art center in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, held Cassils’s first solo museum show. The artist is also participating in a major group show about gender and sexual
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9/2/2020 Cassils: Transgender Artist Goes to Extremes - The New York Times identities at the Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Schwules Museum in Berlin. (The show’s poster is a photograph of Cassils, shirtless and muscular, with bright red lipstick.) In the following edited interview, Cassils discusses some of the ideas behind the challenging work.
Q. I’m sure you’re asked this quite often, but why did you light yourself on fire?
A. In 2002, I graduated from Cal Arts [California Institute of the Arts], which is this essentially Marxist grad school, and went back to my old day job of working as a personal trainer at Crunch in West Hollywood. There I watched the battle of Fallujah on 22 different monitors simultaneously while blonde actresses were running at their optimal fat burn target heart rate. The disparity between those realities really informed this piece. But the title comes from Harun Farocki’s documentary “Inextinguishable Fire” [which deals with the Vietnam War]. There’s this moment where he’s smoking a cigarette and he looks into the camera and says, “The embers from this cigarette burn at 400 degrees Celsius and Napalm burns at 3,000.” And then he extinguishes the cigarette in his arm.
Q. While your performance refers to a similarly extreme act, it’s controlled. There’s no intent to harm yourself.
A. Well, there’s always some risk. And the fact is, in the live performance in London, the tension in the room was unbelievable. And it was helped along by the fact that the stunt coordinator had never done this sort of thing as a live performance and he underestimated the power of stage fright. His hands were shaking as he was putting the fireproof garments and this protective goop on me — to the point that it was blocking my nostrils and my mouth and I couldn’t breathe. And because I had everything miked, the sound created an intimacy, a kind of acoustic focus. You can hear me telling him, “Look I can’t breathe, you gotta take some of this out.” It wasn’t acting, it wasn’t rehearsed, it was an actual moment. And that tension in this simulated environment makes you think about what it would be like to have it not be a consensual performance. What would it mean for an actual body to be experiencing this? I am not self-immolating, I’m doing a controlled action, but it references the constant barrage of images we have of traumatized bodies.
Q. What was the reaction to the performance?
A. People said they were sick to their stomachs, that they were shaking. People were having these intense empathetic physical reactions. The minute you start to strip the garment off, there’s so much adrenaline and, even though you haven’t been burnt, the body has sent stress signals, so there’s a convulsing that happens partly due to the hypothermia and partly due to the body being traumatized slightly. And then you just undergo an after-care, which is to warm up, and then those sensations subside.
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9/2/2020 Cassils: Transgender Artist Goes to Extremes - The New York Times Q. How does a piece like this relate to transgender politics?
A. It’s about not having a fixed body, but a body that’s in a constant state of flux. My goal is to hopefully ask people to think more critically. When you look at me, you’re not seeing my body, you’re seeing, in this case, an abstracted human form engulfed in flames, and you can place yourself in that position for a moment and think about what it would be like to be subjected to that violence. Thinking about that may change the way you walk through the world. Stephen Heyman
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 19, 2015 in The New York Times International Edition
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PRESS9/2/2020 Artist Heather Cassils is set on fire – and opens our eyes to violence | Stage | The Guardian
Artist Heather Cassils is set on fire and opens our eyes to violence Inextinguishable Fire, performed at the National Theatre as part of Spill festival, takes on the mantle of every violent act you have ever heard about
Lyn Gardner Mon 9 Nov 2015 07.28 EST
On Sunday evening, the Spill festival ended not with a bang but with flames being extinguished on the stage of the National’s Dorfman theatre where, 14 seconds previously, the Canadian artist Heather Cassils had been set on fire. It was the first and, Cassils has said, last ever live performance of Inextinguishable Fire, a piece that already exists in film form, showing the artist’s full body burn in slow motion, with the 14 seconds extended to 14 minutes.
The film was shown immediately after the live performance. Projected on to one of the walls of the Royal Festival Hall in London, the film and the memory of the live performance spoke back and forth in constant dialogue. Spill has often been at its best and most potent when, as in Poppy Jackson’s Site, it has spilled out on to the streets and disrupted the spectacle of everyday life. Passersby outside the South Bank glanced up curiously to look at the screen, some stopped to take a closer look at the burning human being; many hurried on by. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2015/nov/09/heather-cassils-inextinguishable-fire-spill-festival-national-theatre 1/4 CASSILS 2020 PRESS
9/2/2020 Artist Heather Cassils is set on fire – and opens our eyes to violence | Stage | The Guardian After all, we are surrounded by violent images all day and every day on rolling TV news, in the movies and online if we want to click on them. Some of them are real and some manufactured. Can we always tell the difference? Do we sometimes assume that one is the other? Cassils’ Inextinguishable Fire takes its name from Harun Farocki’s 1969 film of the same name, which suggested that when we shut our eyes to images of violence, we also close our eyes to the facts. By making us bear witness to the live event on stage, Cassils makes us look at the film through new eyes. We understand that what we are watching really is a human being on fire, as the 14 seconds of live action and 14 minutes of film merge together.
Of course, what we are also seeing is violence constructed and deconstructed. There was a particular reverberation in having Inextinguishable Fire take place on one of the National Theatre’s main stages – not least as a signpost that Rufus Norris’ new regime really might bring significant changes in artistic direction and genuinely start embracing contemporary theatre and live-art practice. But it was potent, too, because this is a stage where every night audiences watch actors pretending to be shot, murdered and mutilated; they fall and die night after night and rise again for the curtain call and are shot and die again tomorrow night. They simply play at being dead.
Cassils’ piece plays on the idea of performance and performing violence. It is itself a construct, but one in which there is real and significant peril. You feel the tension; you can see it in Cassils’ body. But nonetheless, this is a performance, and it never tries to hide that: we watch Cassils being prepared for the moment when the first flame will flare, being robed in layer after layer of protective clothing, just as an actor gets into their costume.
The difference, of course, is that the actor is there to play a character, whereas what Cassils takes on is the mantle of every violent act that you have ever seen or heard about. Cassils is Joan of Arc about to go to the stake, the napalmed child running from a Vietnam village, the unnamed soldiers in the burned out vehicles on a desert road; the family burned alive in a home mistakenly targeted. Cassils makes you look; the artist dares you to avert your eyes from the safety of your theatre seat. Cassils makes you think you’ve smelt and felt the flames when you haven’t, refuses to allow you to distance yourself from what you are witnessing. Like so much at Spill over the last 10 days, Inextinguishable Fire put a match under our certainties and perceptions, making you confront what you might prefer to ignore. America is at a crossroads ...... and its direction in the coming months will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times. Over the last three years, much of what the Guardian holds dear has been threatened – democracy, civility, truth.
The country is at a crossroads. Science is in a battle with conjecture and instinct to determine policy in the middle of a pandemic. At the same time, the US is reckoning with centuries of racial injustice – as the White House stokes division along racial lines. At a time like this, an independent news organisation that fights for truth and holds power to account is not just optional. It is essential.
Like many news organizations, the Guardian has been significantly impacted by the pandemic. We rely to an ever greater extent on our readers, both for the moral force to continue doing journalism at a time like this and for the financial strength to facilitate that reporting.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2015/nov/09/heather-cassils-inextinguishable-fire-spill-festival-national-theatre 2/4 9/2/2020 A 1,900-Pound Sculpture Pushed Through the Streets of Omaha, in Tribute to Its LGBTQ History
CASSILS 2020 PRESS
ART A 1,900-Pound Sculpture Pushed Through the Streets of Omaha, in Tribute to Its LGBTQ History The solemn, four-hour procession closed out an exhibition by Cassils at the Bemis Center.
Karen Emenhiser-Harris May 5, 2017
OMAHA — Brute physicality and fugitive imagery lie within the heart of Phantom Revenant, a solo exhibition at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art that was bookended by two performances by Cassils, a gender- nonconforming artist and 2017 Guggenheim Cassils, “Monument Push” performance stills, 2017 (photos by John Ficenec; all Fellow based in Los Angeles. images courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Art, NY) The exhibition came to a solemn conclusion on a drab and rainy April 29 as passersby in Omaha, Nebraska, witnessed a slow-moving and mostly silent procession of about 70 people. At its front, a 600-pound cart bearing a 1,300-pound bronze sculpture was, in a group effort, arduously pushed, pulled, thrust, and jimmied over the cracked sidewalks and buckled cobblestones of the city’s Old Market neighborhood. Beginning at the Bemis Center, which organized the exhibition and performances, the four-hour procession stopped at six preselected locations for a quiet pause or short address by members of and advocates for the local LGBTQ community.
https://hyperallergic.com/377494/a-1900-pound-sculpture-pushed-through-the-streets-of-omaha-in-tribute-to-its-lgbtq-history/ 1/5 CASSILS 2020
PRESS9/2/2020 A 1,900-Pound Sculpture Pushed Through the Streets of Omaha, in Tribute to Its LGBTQ History This was the world premiere of “Monument Push,” the newest work by Cassils, a performance artist known for radically transforming their own body through rigorous, drug-free physical training in an exploration of identities unbounded by the rigid male/female binary. To create this piece, Cassils worked with Bemis curator Alex Priest and Omaha community members for six months, choosing the sites and acquiring the legal permits. The work performs a similar transformation upon the hidden and marginalized history of each chosen location along the 1.5- mile route, monumentalizing its symbolic import in a tribute to community resilience.
Some of the sites chosen marked locations of violence, such as the street where a 2013 gay- related hate crime took place and the Douglas County Correctional Center, where incarcerated queer youth are often placed in solitary confinement — allegedly for their own protection. One of the most moving moments of the procession came when the crowd gathered in front of the center and Dominique Morgan, a local social activist, R&B artist, and Cassils, “Monument Push” performance still, 2017 (photo by John Ficenec) recipient of the NAACP Freedom Fighter Award, took a break from pushing to softly perform a song he had written while confined there in his youth. When he raised his voice for the refrain, it echoed off the walls of the center, amplifying his personal pain and trauma. Other sites marked points of resistance and celebration, such as the street where Omaha’s first gay pride parade took place in 1985.
The approximately 54” sculpture at the center of “Monument Push” is “The Resistance of the 20%” (2016), the title of which refers to a 2012 statistic concerning the 20% increase in the murder rate of trans people. The piece, which is wide at the base and tapers toward the top, is roughly reminiscent of an obelisk, that most ancient of monuments, but its entire surface records the imprints of fists, knees, elbows, and feet: evidence of a furious and thorough beating. As I took my turn helping to push the 1,900-pound mass, I struggled not only against its weight, but to somehow gain purchase, to fit my own hand into the jagged imprints of that violence. It was a brief test of my own endurance and a profound experience of empathy.
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PRESS9/2/2020 A 1,900-Pound Sculpture Pushed Through the Streets of Omaha, in Tribute to Its LGBTQ History The beaten form of the sculpture was directly tied to the opening performance of Phantom Revenant. This was “Becoming an Image,” Cassils’s 14th performance of their now- acclaimed work. As with previous iterations, viewers were brought into a pitch-dark room and instructed to wait silently. Cassils soon entered along with a photographer — both as blinded by the dark as the audience. Suddenly, loud smacking sounds resounded as the artist Cassils, “Monument Push” performance usly pummel a 2,000-pound clay stills, 2017 (photo by John Ficenec) began to furio block that had been placed in the center of the room. Grunts and heavy breathing were recorded. The camera flashed, momentarily illuminating the arresting sight of a large monolithic form under fierce attack by the ambiguously sexed, powerfully muscled, nude artist. The ruthless pounding continued, intermittently lit by flashes of light that burned the image, quite literally, into the retinas of the crowd. The sporadic flashes provided the only light and the only record of the artist’s performance, while the searing images implicated the viewers as witnesses. After 25 minutes, the clay monolith had been reduced to a formless mass and the performance concluded.
A few days later, I visited the room where the remains, as it were, lay under a dim spotlight, the clay still moist. A soundtrack of Cassils’s breathing and the aural impact of body on clay looped loudly in the background, accompanied subtly by the pulsing of a disembodied heartbeat. Layered with the sounds of violence, a sense of defeat and vulnerability permeated the space. After a 2013 performance of “Becoming an Image,” a similar clay remnant was cast into bronze. “Monument Push” marked its first public display.
The blunt materiality of fists and metal, the sculpting of both clay and flesh — these are the primitive tools and techniques employed by the artist to make manifest a global history of violence and trauma. In a brief interview, Cassils told Hyperallergic, “My use of boxing and bodybuilding queer my knowledge of physiology, body mechanics, and nutrition to express ideas about gender and blur the lines of what is possible.” Given the plasticity of the body, the work speaks to the construction of identity. Cassils traces their interest in this back to 2003, when they were working as a trainer in Los Angeles with B actors who needed to
https://hyperallergic.com/377494/a-1900-pound-sculpture-pushed-through-the-streets-of-omaha-in-tribute-to-its-lgbtq-history/ 3/5 CASSILS 2020
PRESS9/2/2020 A 1,900-Pound Sculpture Pushed Through the Streets of Omaha, in Tribute to Its LGBTQ History look like soldiers in six weeks. “It became my job to construct the physicality or image of militarism on a body that had nothing to do with that but that represented its symbolic gesture,” Cassils said.
Cassils’s
“Becoming an Image,” performance still, “Becoming an Image,” performance still, 2017 (photo by Cassils with Bill 2017 (photo by Cassils with Bill Sitzmann) Sitzmann)
interrogation of the mediated image is paramount to their work and could also be seen in a six-channel video installation, “The Powers That Be” (2015–17), a juxtaposition of LA’s industrial production of imagery with amateur videos. Cassils worked with a Hollywood fight choreographer to simulate a brutally eerie match, lit only by car headlights, between themselves and a phantom opponent. Cellphone videos made by members of the audience provide the only record of the performance, once again calling attention to the role of the viewer as witness.
That act of bearing witness, particularly to the staging of today’s political reality, couldn’t be more timely, particularly here in Omaha. “In the current sociopolitical climate, it is amazing to be asked to do this piece in the Midwest,” Cassils said. “It is even more powerful here than in NY or LA. There was a women’s march here — a huge women’s march — and there is resistance here, and there is critical thinking here. The willingness to support this project is probably greater here than it would be in larger cities right now, and I think that is pretty wonderful.”
Phantom Revenant was on view at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (724 S. 12th Street, Omaha) through April 29.
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Protesting U.S. Immigration Policies, Artists Aim for the Sky This Independence Day, 70 artists are having messages of solidarity and defiance typed in the sky to highlight the plight of immigrants held in detention centers.
By Zachary Small
July 3, 2020
The Thunderbirds and Blue Angels that President Trump plans to send flying over the National Mall this Fourth of July will have some stiff competition from a group of 70 artists looking to spread their own messages across the nation’s skies.
Two fleets of five skytyping planes each are set for takeoff across the country this Independence Day weekend armed with calls for the abolition of the immigrant detention in the United States as part of the project “In Plain Sight.” (Developed from older skywriting technology, skytyping planes inject oil into their exhaust systems to produce a white smoke that is released into the sky by a computer- controlled system to produce precise letter-writing.) Phrases like “Care Not Cages,” “Unseen Mothers” and “Nosotras Te Vemos (We See You)” will momentarily hover above 80 locations — including detention facilities, immigration courts, prisons, borders and historic sites like Ellis Island — before dissipating into the atmosphere. And some of the messages will be skytyped in nearly 20 languages, including Hindi, Kurdish, Lakota and Punjabi.
The project started a year ago when the artists Cassils and rafa esparza teamed up with a goal of forming a coalition of artists and activists determined to address the ills of mass detention. The initiative’s members include the lawyer Chase Strangio; a founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors; and the artist Hank Willis Thomas — alongside 10 partner organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, Raices and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
9/2/2020 Protesting U.S. Immigration Policies, Artists Aim for the Sky - The New York Times
An AR still of “Soy Paz Soy Más,” one of the phrases that will momentarily hover above locations like detention facilities, immigration courts, prisons and borders before they dissipate. Maria Gaspar
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An AR still of “Nosotras Te Vemos.” The skytyping will appear in 19 languages. Zackary Drucker
“As a lawyer, I am often constrained by the structural and discursive limits of the law,” said Strangio, who’s using his corner of the sky to memorialize Lorena Borjas, a transgender immigrant activist who died of Covid-19 in March. “I believe that art and artistic disruption are essential components of movements for social transformation.” 9/2/2020 Protesting U.S. Immigration Policies, Artists Aim for the Sky - The New York Times For the artist Alok Vaid-Menon — whose message “God Brown America” will be skytyped above the Montgomery Processing Center close to CASSILSVaid-Menon’s hometown, College Park, Texas — the project represents a commitment to elevating the stories of migrants and2020 gender- nonconforming people. “As a descendant of refugees, it’s really important for me to help with this cause,” Vaid-Menon said. “I want to make surPRESSe people of color and immigrants in Texas feel like they belong.” An AR still of “Nosotras Te Vemos.” The skytyping will appear in 19 languages. Zackary Drucker But the challenge of putting art into the sky has also required the legwork of a medium-sized production team led by Cristy Michel, who is also Cassils’ life partner. They found one company that does skytyping, she said, referring to Skytypers, which does the vast majority of the“As businesa lawyers, inI am the often United constr States.ained “And by thisthe structuris not somethingal and discur the sipilotsve limits have of done the beforlaw,” e,said” she Str said.angio, “U whosual’sly using what histhey corner write of look thes skylike to ʻGmemorializeeico, Geico, L Goreico.ena ’Borjas” , a transgender immigrant activist who died of Covid-19 in March. “I believe that art and artistic disruption are essential components of movements for social transformation.” “When I sense the skytypers getting nervous,” Michel added, “we get into a discussion about how art helps the mind expand and think aboutFor the futur artiste pos Aloksibilities. Vaid-M”enon — whose message “God Brown America” will be skytyped above the Montgomery Processing Center close to Vaid-Menon’s hometown, College Park, Texas — the project represents a commitment to elevating the stories of migrants and gender- Speakingnonconforming by phone people. last “wAseek, a descendant Cassils and of esparza refugees, described it’s real thely import artisticant impulses for me to behind help with “In Plainthis c ause,Sight.”” Vaid-Menon said. “I want to make sure people of color and immigrants in Texas feel like they belong.”
But the challenge of putting art into the sky has also required the legwork of a medium-sized production team led by Cristy Michel, who is also Cassils’ life partner. They found one company that does skytyping, she said, referring to Skytypers, which does the vast majority of the business in the United States. “And this is not something the pilots have done before,” she said. “Usually what they write looks like ʻGeico, Geico, Geico.’” How can we help you lead a better, more fulfilling life at home during the pandemic? “When I sense the skytypers getting nervous,” Michel added, “we get into a discussion about how art helps the mind expand and think about future possibilities.” Ask us a question or tell us what’s on your mind.
SpeakingSubmit bay ques phonetion last week, Cassils and esparza described the artistic impulses behind “In Plain Sight.”
These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
In recent years, artists haveH sopwr ecaand twhe ihelpr pol iytouica llead mes as abetgeters o,n mor billeb ofulfilardsling, fill lifeed m atu shomeeums during with a gtheitp rpandemic?op and even started their own activist groups. How did you decide to bring your Askpro jusec at questioninto the or c lteloul usds what? ’s on your mind. CASSILS About a year ago, rafa started a conversation with a bunch of artists in Los Angeles about issues surrounding migrant detention. We wSubmitere trying a ques tionto counter feelings of hopelessness and wondered what we, as artists, could do to visualize the issue on a massive scale. I’m a performance artist who is often given a pretty modest budget; there are often limitations to what’s possible. But what if artists like us could plan something bigger? What if artists had the same budget as a shoe company does for its brand promotions, but rather than selling objects, we would be promoting a constructive dialogue? Then, we thought about the air shows that typically happen on Independence Day. Was it possible to usurp this traditional display of patriotism and retool it to bring attention to harmful migration policies? There’s no These are edited excerpts from that conversation. censorship in the sky. It would be a perfect platform for mass engagement. In recent years, artists have spread their political messages on billboards, filled museums with agitprop and even started their own ESPARZA There were simple questions: How do you let incarcerated people know that you care? From there, our approach broadened by awcorkingtivist g withroup sa. cohortHow d iofd yartistsou de candide tano b advringoc yacouyr impactproject team. into t hWee c alsoloud sha?ve a film director working on a documentary about the project. CASSILS About a year ago, rafa started a conversation with a bunch of artists in Los Angeles about issues surrounding migrant detention. We were trying to counter feelings of hopelessness and wondered what we, as artists, could do to visualize the issue on a massive scale. I’m a performance artist who is often given a pretty modest budget; there are often limitations to what’s possible. But what if artists like us could plan something bigger? What if artists had the same budget as a shoe company does for its brand promotions, but rather than selling objects, we would be promoting a constructive dialogue? Then, we thought about the air shows that typically happen on Independence Day. Was it possible to usurp this traditional display of patriotism and retool it to bring attention to harmful migration policies? There’s no censorship in the sky. It would be a perfect platform for mass engagement.
ESPARZA There were simple questions: How do you let incarcerated people know that you care? From there, our approach broadened by working with a cohort of artists and an advocacy impact team. We also have a film director working on a documentary about the project. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/arts/design/july-4-skytyping-skywriting-immigration.html 3/4
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CASSILS 2020 PRESS
An AR still of “Modeerf,” above a corrections center in Baldwin County, Ala. Sonya Clark
How has the project changed since the coronavirus pandemic? Has the outbreak forced you to alter your approach?
CASSILS The urgency of “In Plain Sight” has become paramount as people began to die from Covid-19 in detention camps. We had initially planned for this project to occur without any press, but when the pandemic hit, we launched our Instagram page that features short interviews with our artists and calls to action. It’s been a great opportunity to take action. In recent months, I’ve had 11 exhibitions canceled or paused. Almost every artist I know has, too.
There is a rich history of artists looking toward the sky for inspiration. Yves Klein used it as inspiration for his conceptual blue paintings. Recently, the artist Jammie Holmes flew George Floyd’s final words above five cities across the country. What other works have inspired your skytyping project?
ESPARZA “Repellent Fence” (2015) by the art collective Postcommodity was particularly important for us. They created a metaphorical suture along the migration path between the United States and Mexico with tethered balloons to speak about land art in relation to permanence and shifting landscapes. In the same way that they used the land to talk about the divisive power of colonial structures, we are hoping to index the sky as a symbol of inspiration and hope. And the sky is able to migrate messages across borders. When our message is skytyped above San Diego, the words will likely drift into Tijuana. And when our words are written above Los Angeles, they will have a shared orbital path, allowing phrases like “Abolition Now” and “Stop Crimigration Now” to coalesce into a circular message.
CASSILS We are also thinking of artists who have used the language of advertisement to get their points across. Artists like Lynda Benglis and Barbara Hammer. The AIDS Memorial Quilt was another important reference because it demonstrates how people can come together through a patchwork of activism.
Many artists involved with the project are also queer, which may or may not be a coincidence. We are thinking about the words of José Esteban Muñoz, who wrote in 2009 that “queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.” We see a liberation for queer, migrant and Black communities as deeply bound together because they are all rooted in the issues of white supremacy and colonization. Our jobs as queer artists is to imagine the future.
ESPARZA And we are putting the proposal of care, which is central to many queer communities, at the forefront of this project. We want to imagine what care looks like for people who are impacted by migrant detention and Covid-19.
CASSILS Bringing the skytypers into the fold has also been a unique experience. And with some messages being written in Cree, Farsi and Urdu, this will likely be the first time many people will see their own languages in the sky. There has also been a challenge to imagine how to write languages in the sky that don’t use the Roman alphabet. Skytypers usually work in fleets of five planes each, so any image or letter must exist along a five-point matrix. For artists on the project, that means experimenting with the grid and drawing out words like “freedom” in Farsi or Urdu. It’s interesting to note the challenges of what we can put into the sky, and how we might overcome those barriers.
In Plain Sight
Find out how to see the art at: instagram.com/inplainsightmap/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/arts/design/july-4-skytyping-skywriting-immigration.html 4/4 9/2/2020 80 artists sent sky messages over U.S. detention centers - Los Angeles Times
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ADVERTISEMENT ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS Did you see, up in the sky? 80 artists sent messages over U.S. detention centers
ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS Did you see, up in the sky? 80 artists sent messages over U.S. detention centers
“Care not cages,” a skytyped message created by L.A. artist and Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors as part of “In Plain Sight.” (Chris Mastro / In Plain Sight)
By CAROLINA A. MIRANDA | STAFF WRITER
JULY 3, 2020 | 9 AM
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-07-03/july-4th-80-artists-sky-write-messages-over-detention-centers 1/12
“Care not cages,” a skytyped message created by L.A. artist and Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors as part of “In Plain Sight.” (Chris Mastro / In Plain Sight)
By CAROLINA A. MIRANDA | STAFF WRITER
JULY 3, 2020 | 9 AM
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-07-03/july-4th-80-artists-sky-write-messages-over-detention-centers 1/12 CASSILS 2020 9/2/2020PRESS 80 artists sent sky messages over U.S. detention centers - Los Angeles Times
It is a Fourth of July custom. Fleets of airplanes take to the sky and produce massive typewritten messages in the air. Known as skytyping, these vaporous missives generally serve as advertising for music festivals, summer movies or car insurance and are often generated over public parks and crowded beaches.
Over the holiday weekend, however, some of those messages and their locations were quite out of the ordinary.
A group of 80 artists from around the country, led by rafa esparza and Cassils, teamed up to produce skytyped messages that appeared over immigrant detention camps around the United States, as well as other sites related to immigration, internment and incarceration.
The project, called “In Plain Sight,” lasted for four days beginning Friday morning and featured messages such as “ICE will melt,” “Care not cages” and “No more camps” displayed over sites such as the New Orleans field office for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Los Angeles County Jail and Santa Anita Park, which served as a temporary detention facility for Japanese Americans during World War II.
Also included were messages in Spanish, such as “No te rindas” (Don’t give up) written over the U.S. Customs and Border Protection outpost at the San Ysidro Port of Entry and one in the Mayan language of K’iche’, which materialized over the Donna Rio-Bravo International Bridge near McAllen, Texas. That message — “Ma ka qa xe’ij ta q’ib,” which translates to “We will not be afraid” — was organized by artist Beatriz Cortez and a coalition of Central American community organizations.
Cortez also organized a separate message on her own: “No cages, no jaulas,” which appeared in the clear blue skies over downtown Los Angeles on Friday afternoon.
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CASSILS 2020
9/2/2020PRESS 80 artists sent sky messages over U.S. detention centers - Los Angeles Times
“No cages, no jaulas,” a s y-typed message by Beatriz Cortez over the immigration court on Olive Street in downtown L.A. (Dee Gonzalez / In Plain Sight)
“It’s exiting the confines of traditional art spaces and using the sky as the ultimate platform,” said esparza in advance of the project’s launch.
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“No cages, no jaulas,” a s y-typed message by Beatriz Cortez over the immigration court on Olive Street in downtown L.A. (Dee Gonzalez / In Plain Sight) SPONSORED CONTENT
Adding this could reduce portfolio volatility “It’s exiting the confines of traditional art spaces and using the sky as the ultimate platform,” said esparza in advance By Thrivent Asset Management of the project’s launch. Reducing the effects of extreme market swings might be possible in a fund designed with a goal of lower volatility.
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Added Cassils: “It’s thinking about how art can serve.” SPONSORED CONTENT
It was also about producing a workA thatddin couldg this havecould briefly reduc ebeen port visiblefolio vo tola tthoseility who are incarcerated as well. By Thrivent Asset Management Reducing the effects of extreme market swings might be possible in a fund designed with a goal of lower volatility.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-07-03/july-4th-80-artists-sky-write-messages-over-detention-centers 3/12 Added Cassils: “It’s thinking about how art can serve.”
It was also about producing a work that could have briefly been visible to those who are incarcerated as well.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-07-03/july-4th-80-artists-sky-write-messages-over-detention-centers 3/12 CASSILS 2020
PRESS9/2/2020 80 artists sent sky messages over U.S. detention centers - Los Angeles Times The artists described the action as a vast collective artwork — albeit one with a distinct purpose. Each skytyped message featured the hashtag #XMAP, which led the curious back to the project’s website: xmap.us. That page features a list of all the participating artists and their respective sky messages, information about immigrant detention and a map of incarceration sites around the U.S., along with a list of organizations fighting for immigrant causes, such as the National Immigration Detention Bond Fund, which helps immigrants pay bonds set by immigration judges.
A map by the artist project “In Plain Sight” shows immigrant detention centers around the U.S. — along with sites that will feature skytyped messages over the Fourth of July weekend. (In Plain Sight)
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“You’ll also be able to put in your ZIP Code and see what detention center you’re closest to,” says esparza. “In terms of the sheer amount of immigrant detention centers — it’s something that people feel distant from. People place them along the border, but they don’t imagine them in every state. We want people to know that.”
Among the participating artists were Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors (whose message “Care not cages” appeared in downtown); Mexican singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas; graphic designer Emory Douglas, once the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party; and a range of cultural practitioners, including Ken Gonzales- Day, Harry Gamboa Jr., Mary Kelly, Susan Silton, Raquel Gutiérrez, Raven Chacon, Karen L. Ishizuka, Edgar Arceneaux, Cannupa Hanska Luger and Devon Tsuno.
Esparza, a Los Angeles artist whose work straddles performance, painting and installations crafted with handmade adobe, said the idea for “In Plain Sight” was born around July 4 last year amid rising concerns over the sheer number of incarcerated immigrants and the conditions they endure.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-07-03/july-4th-80-artists-sky-write-messages-over-detention-centers 4/12 CASSILS 2020 PRESS 9/2/2020 80 artists sent sky messages over U.S. detention centers - Los Angeles Times “There was a group of artists that had self-organized,” he explained. “We wanted to create visibility around immigrant detention.”
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“La lucha lives,” a s ytyped message created by artist Cruz Ortiz over the Central Texas Detention Facility in San Antonio on Friday morning. (Anthony Francis)
The group began discussing ideas in a group chat on Signal. Cassils, a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages issues of the body, gender and sexuality, was in Europe at the time — but was moved by the discussion.
“I’m from Montreal,” Cassils said. “Immigration has weighed on my life for a long time. It took me 17 years to immigrate and that was with all the resources. ... Navigating the immigration system and staying in compliance and the expense of it. The lack of ability for me to hire a lawyer. It was so incredibly difficult.
“I can’t imagine if you’re trying to do this while you are fleeing for your life. To land in this country that is supposed to be about freedom and they lock you in a cage for profit. That is appalling to me as a new citizen.”
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“SHAME #DEFUNDHATE # MAP,” a skytyped message by artist Cassils over the Geo Group Headquarters, a private prisons company, in Los Angeles on July 3. (Robin Black / In Plain Sight)
Rather than doing a benefit show in a gallery or staging some sort of charity auction, the group wanted something that would make a big statement to the broadest audience possible. Skytyped messages emerged as an idea that could help an unseen problem (incarceration) be accessed by everyone.
“It also,” says Cassils, “seemed like a brilliant way to invert the terms of patriotism” — airplanes taking to the sky during Fourth of July.
So they got to work fundraising. Patching together donations from private supporters and arts organizations, the pair were able to generate the six figures necessary to put planes in the sky Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, for a total of 80 skytyped messages. But everything else has been a volunteer effort. Dozens of artists, along with uncounted others, have donated their time to make “In Plain Sight” happen.
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https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-07-03/july-4th-80-artists-sky-write-messages-over-detention-centers 6/12 9/2/2020 80 artists sent sky messages over U.S. detention centers - Los Angeles Times Esparza said many were personally motivated to participate.
ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS CASSILS Los Angeles artists probe grief and violence in video art show from Guadalupe Rosales 2020 PRESS June 19, 2020 9/2/2020 80 artists sent sky messages over U.S. detention centers - Los Angeles Times Esparza said many were personally motivated to participate.
“There are folks whose family members were in incarceration camps during World War II,” he said. “There are folks ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS who have relativesLo sthat Ang ewereles ar Holocausttists probe g rsurvivors.ief and viol eAndnce iBlackn video artists art sho thatw fro usem G utheiradalu workpe Ro stoale talks about the prison industrial complex.June 1We9, 20 20are all wanting to harness our voices to focus it on immigrant detention.”
Beyond the sky messages, “In Plain Sight” will exist in other ways. Documentarian PJ Raval and producer Farihah Zaman are filming a documentary series related to the project that will explore deeper issues of migration and “Thereidentity. are To folks make whose up for family the carbon members footprint, were in artist incarceration Sam Van Akencamps is duringplanting World trees War close II,” to hedetention said. “There facilities are folksand whoother have carceral relatives sites. that were Holocaust survivors. And Black artists that use their work to talk about the prison industrial complex. We are all wanting to harness our voices to focus it on immigrant detention.” ADVERTISEMENT
Beyond the sky messages, “In Plain Sight” will exist in other ways. Documentarian PJ Raval and producer Farihah Zaman are filming a documentary series related to the project that will explore deeper issues of migration and identity. To make up for the carbon footprint, artist Sam Van Aken is planting trees close to detention facilities and other carceral sites.
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An augmented reality visualization of the words “No more camps” skytyped over Santa Anita Park. The project was organized by curator Karen Ishizuka and the group Tsuru for Solidarity. (4th Wall AR / In Plain Sight)
Artist Nancy Baker Cahill has uploaded the skytyped messages into her augmented reality app, 4th Wall, which users can download for free to their phones. Once the app is installed, it is possible to view the skytyped messages virtually at each location. Not sure where those locations might be? A function in the app uses geolocation to direct users to the nearest site. An augmented reality visualization of the words “No more camps” skytyped over Santa Anita Park. The project was organized by curator Karen Ishizuka and the group Tsuru for Solidarity. (4th Wall AR / In Plain Sight) https://wwwArtist .latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-07-03/july-4th-80-artists-sky-write-messages-overNancy Baker Cahill has uploaded the skytyped messages into her augmented-detention-centers reality app, 4th Wall, which users7/12 can download for free to their phones. Once the app is installed, it is possible to view the skytyped messages virtually at each location. Not sure where those locations might be? A function in the app uses geolocation to direct users to the nearest site.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-07-03/july-4th-80-artists-sky-write-messages-over-detention-centers 7/12 CASSILS 2020 PRESS 9/2/2020 80 artists sent sky messages over U.S. detention centers - Los Angeles Times Moreover, Oxy Arts, the cultural space run by Occidental College in Eagle Rock, which is serving as a presenter of the project, will host a fall exhibition of participating artists and offer related programming, such as panels and performances.
“In Plain Sight,” therefore, will continue to exist in myriad forms after the last clouds of vapor have evaporated.
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Said Cassils: “It will live on.”
9/2/2020 80 artists sent sky messages over U.S. detention centers - Los Angeles Times Carolina A. Miranda is a Los Angeles ITimesn Plain staffSight writer covering culture, with a focus on art and architecture. Where: Locations all over the U.S., for a MORE FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMES location near you, see the website
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Born Toronto, Canada Raised Montreal, Quebec Lives in Los Angeles, California, USA
Education 2002 MFA Art and Integrated Media, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, CA 1997 BFA Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, NS, Canada 1996 Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts, Paris, France
Solo Exhibitions 2021 Walter Phillips Gallery, BANFF Center for Arts and Creativity, BANFF, Canada HOME, Manchester, UK Canadian Stage, Toronto, Canada, new commision 2019 Perth Museum of Contemporary Art, Alchemic, Australia 2018 Station Museum, Solutions, Houston, TX 2017 Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Monumental, New York, NY National Gallery of the Republic of Macedonia, ExPEAUSition, Skopje, Macedonia Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Cassils: The Phantom Reverent, Omaha, NE 2016 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Melt/Carve/Forge: Embodied Sculptures by Cassils, Philadelphia, PA School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Breaking News: Cassils, Boston, MA 2015 MU, Incendiary, Eindhoven, The Netherlands 2014 Trinity Square Video, Cassils: Compositions, Toronto, Canada 2013 Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Body of Work, New York, NY
Group Exhibitions 2020 Galerie Crone Wien, Diskrete Simulation, Vienna, Austria Disjecta, Ungodly, Portland, OR Craft Contemporary, The Body, The Object, The Other, Los Angeles, CA Gardiner Museum, RAW, Toronto, CA Barbican, Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography, London, UK The Armory Show, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, NY Zentrum für Zeitgenössische Kunst at Syker Vorwerk, Fluidity, Berlin Tang Museum, Skidmore College, FLEX, Saratoga Springs, NY Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Trans/American: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today, Chapel Hill, NC CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
2019 Wellcome Collection, Being Human, London, UK (Permanent Exhibition) Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Ancient History of a Distant Future, Philadelphia, PA Art Gallery Burlington, The Gender Conspiracy, Burlington, Ontario Dark Mofo, A Forest, Hobart, Tasmania The McNay Art Museum, Transamerica/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today, San Antonio, TX Annenberg Space for Photography, For Freedoms, Culver City, CA Artothèque of Strasbourg, Corps-à-Coeurs, Strasbourg, France French National Museum Mucem, Shall We Dance, Marseille, France MASS MoCA, Suffering from Realness, North Adams, MA Oakland Museum of California, Queer California: Untold Stories, Oakland, CA The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Building A House Without Walls: The Value of Sanctuary, New York, NY Gazelli Art House, It’s Not Me, It’s You, London, UK
2018 Museum of Contemporary Art, Blessed Be: Mysticism Spirituality, and the Occult In Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ Bureau of General Services—Queer Division Division, Cast of Characters, New York, NY Navel, Queer Biennial, Los Angeles, CA SOMA Arts, A History of Violence, San Francisco, CA Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, City of LA Individual Artist Fellowships Exhibition, Los Angeles, CA VCU Institute for Contemporary Art, Declaration, Richmond, VA Houston Center for Photography, Margin and Center, Houston, TX Kunstpalais, Altered Substances, Erlangen, Germany Boehm Gallery at Palomar College Ceramic Biannual, Humanize, San Diego, CA Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Haptic Tactics, New York, NY University of Victoria Transgender Archives, Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects, Victoria, BC National Gallery of Art, Sopot, Poland, January
2017 Everson Museum, Seen & Heard, Syracuse, NY P.P.O.W., Visual Notes From An Upside Down World, NY, NY Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Art on the Front Lines, NYC, NY SOMArts, Self to #Selfie, San Francisco, CA Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Digital Aura, Madison, WI Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Expanded Visions: Fifty Years of Collecting, New York, NY Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts, Masculine ← → Feminine, Irvine, CA Wignall Center for Contemporary Art, Chaffey College, Man Up! Masculinity in Question, Rancho Cucamonga, CA Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Ecstasy of Mary Shelley, Los Angeles, CA CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
2016 III° Venice International Performance Art Week, European Cultural Centre, Fragile Body - Material Body, Venice Italy Never Apart Centre, Non-Binary, Montréal, Canada Galerie Confluences, Trans Time, Paris France Le Musée d’Art Contemporain des Laurentides, Réponse, Quebec, Canada Roundhouse Gallery, Drama Queer, Vancouver, Canada Museum of Contemporary Art, Intersectionality, Miami, FL Galerie im Taxispalais, Mapping the Body: The Body in Contemporary Life, Innsbruck, Austria Jack Shainman Gallery, For Freedoms, New York, NY LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, HOMOSEXUALITÄT_EN, Münster, Germany
2015 Southbank Centre, Being A Man, London, UK University Art Museum, Central Michigan University, Gender, Mt. Pleasant, MI Deutsches Historishes Museum, HOMOSEXUALITÄT_EN, Berlin, Germany Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Wave & Particle: A Group Exhibition Celebrating the 15th Anniversary of Creative Capital, New York, NY Mohsen Gallery, Strength and Struggle, Tehran, Iran National Gallery of Art, Body Slang, Sopot, Poland
2014 Mobile exhibition, Transient, Los Angeles, CA Kendall College of Art and Design, I Am, Grand Rapids, MI Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History, New York, NY Art Gallery of York University, Labor Intensive, Toronto, Canada Galerie L’Espace Créatif, Trans Time, Montreal, Canada Highways Performance Space, Trigger Warnings, Los Angeles, CA SOMArts, Projected Persona, San Francisco, CA Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Labor Intensive, New York, NY MU Art Space, Genderblender, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, After Our Bodies Meet: From Resistance to Potentiality, New York, NY
Live Performances 2020 Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada, Up To and Including Their Limits SMOQUA—Festival of Feminist and Queer Culture 2020, Rijeka, Croatia, PRESSED Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada, Human Measure
2019 Perth Festival, Perth Australia, Becoming an Image Dark Mofo, Hobart, Tasmania, Tiresias
2018 Station Museum, Houston, TX, Solution; performance featuring Cassils, Rafa Esparza, Fanaa, and Keijuan Thomas Biosphere 2, Oracle, AZ, Cyclic, as part of Blessed Be: Mysticism Spirituality, and the Occult In Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ; performance featuring Cassils, Ron Athey, and Fanaa Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, Austria, Becoming an Image Stanford University, Sweat Paintings University of Victoria Transgender Archives, Victoria, BC, Becoming an Image CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
2017 Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE, Monument Push Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE, Becoming An Image
2016 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, Becoming An Image The Broad, Los Angeles, CA, The Powers That Be: Los Angeles
2015 MU, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Becoming An Image SPILL Festival of Performance, closing performance, National Theatre, London, UK, Inextinguishable Fire City of Women International Festival of Contemporary Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Becoming an Image ANTI Contemporary Performance Festival, Kuopio, Finland, The Powers That Be [210 Kilometers] Fredric March Play Circle Theatre, University Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, Becoming An Image
2014 Rhubarb Festival, opening performance, Toronto, Canada, Becoming An Image, Queer Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia, Becoming An Image
2013 Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY, Becoming An Image Performance Studies International Conference, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Tiresias Fierce Festival, Birmingham, UK, Becoming An Image SPILL Festival of Performance, National Theatre, London, UK, Becoming An Image Edgy Women Festival, Montreal, Canada, Becoming An Image
Screenings 2020 Out Fest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Jackalope
2019 Out Fest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, This Love Is On Fire
2018 Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, Austria, Inextinguishable Fire, 103 Shots, Fast Twitch// Slow Twitch
2017 Outsider Festival, Early Career Retrospective: Cassils, Austin, TX M+, at West Kowloon, Hong Kong, China, Inextinguishable Fire
2016 Live Art Development Agency, at Venice International Performance Art Week, The Powers That Be International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture Sundance Film Festival, New Frontiers, Park City, UT, Inextinguishable Fire
2015 UNSW Galleries, Sydney, Australia, Hard Times Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo, Brazil, Hard Times Fort Mason Center for Art & Culture, San Francisco, CA, Hard Times ANTI Contemporary Performance Festival, Kuopio, Finland, Inextinguishable Fire/Hard Times Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica, Hard Times Asian Experimental Video Festival, Hong Kong, China, Hard Times Festival Ciné à Dos, Koulikoro, Mali, Hard Times Art Cinema Zawya, Cairo, Egypt, Hard Times CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
2014 SOMA Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA, Hard Times Cultureel terras de Kaaij, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Hard Times 3e Festival Everybody’s Perfect, Geneva, Switzerland, Fast Twitch//Slow Twitch Newfest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, New York, NY, Conversations Outfest Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA, Conversations Counterpulse Theatre, San Francisco, CA, Hard Times
2013 Institute for Contemporary Art, London, UK, Fast Twitch//Slow Twitch
Publications, Books, and Exhibition Catalogs 2020 Solutions. Exhibition Catalog for Cassils Solo Show Solutions. Station Museum of Contemporary Art. Halberstam, Jack, “Unbuilding Gender.” Archithese Schriftenreine, Jun- Aug, 2020. pp 26-38
2019 Cambell, Andy. Letter to My Students the Day After the Election. Suffering From Realness. Exhibition Catalog. MASS MoCA and Del Monico Books, 2019. pp. 40-47 Gardner, Lyn. “Nimble and Fleet Footed.” IT’S TIME: How Live Art is Taking on the World From the Front Line to the Bottom Line. Live Art Development Agency, 2019. Cover Image. Schicharin, Luc. “L’art transgenre, vers d’autres expériences corporelles du temps.” GLAD!, June 2019, https://www.revue-glad.org/1554. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 1 (Spring 2019): Cover. Cram, E. “Feeling a Monumental Midwest: Reflections from Monument Push.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 1 (2019): pp. 79-86. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/729605 Rawson, K.J. “Witness, Bystander, or Aggressor? Encountering Cassils.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 1 (2019): pp. 87-93. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/729606 Morris III, Charles E. “Smelling Cassils.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 1 (2019): pp. 94-99. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/729607 Brouwer, Daniel C. “Illness as Metaphor in Cassils’s Trans Performance.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 1 (2019): pp. 100-105. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/729608 Zender, Benjamin. “What Might Be Bullets, Fireworks, or Balloons: Repertoires of More than Survival in Cassils’s 103 Shots and Lyle Ashton Harris and Thomas Allen Harris’s Brotherhood, Crossroads and Etcetera 1994.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 1 (2019): pp. 106-116. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.14321/qed.6.1.0106.pdf Cram, E. and Cassils. “Cassils: On Violence, Witnessing, and the Making of Trans Worlds.”QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 1 (2019): pp. 117-130. https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/729610 TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 1 (2019): Cover. https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/issue/6/1 Steinbock, Eliza. “Postmortem: 103 Shots and Counting.” Performance Matters Journal 3, no. 2. Bacon, Thomas John. “SELF/S: The Phenomenology of 21st Century Performance Art.” Schmidt, Theron, ed. AGENCY: Partial History of Live Art. London: Live Art Development Agency and Intellect Books, 2019. Kinai, Miki. “Forbidden Nude Photography History.” Geijutsu Shincho, January 2019. https://www. shinchosha.co.jp/geishin/backnumber/20181225/ Albers, Katherine P, Joan Saab, Catherine Zuromskis, and Audrey Anable, eds. Wiley Blackwell Companion to Visual Culture. Indianapolis: Wiley & Sons, 2019. Apostol, Corina L. and Nato Thompson, eds. Making Another World Possible: 10 Creative Time Summits, 10 Global Issues, 100 Art Projects. London: Routledge, 2019. CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
Museum for Europe and the Mediterranean civilisations (MuCEM). On danse?. Paris: MuCEM & Lienart éditions, 2019. Parness, Noam and Gonzalo Casals, eds. Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2019. Westengrad, Laura. Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma. Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 2019. Markonish, Denise. Suffering from Realness. New York and London: Prestel Verlag GmbH & Company KG., 2019 Wickstrom,Maurya. Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019 Steinbock, Eliza. “A conversation with Cassils on propagating collective resilience in times of war.” Performance Matters Journal 4, (2019): pp. 108–127. https://performancematters-thejournal. com/index.php/pm/article/view/109/225 Steinbock, Eliza. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Sansonetti, A. “Home and Abroad in Gold: A Dialogue with Cassils.” Canadian Theatre Review 179 (2019): 49-54. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/731930.
2018 Carrol, Rachel. Transgender and the Literary Imagination. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Cover Image. Horvat, Ana. Tranimacies and Affective Trans Embodiment in Nina Arsenault’s Silicone Diaries and Cassils Becoming an Image .a/b: AUTO/BIOGRAPHY STUDIES, (2018) Vol. 33, No. 2 pp. 395- 415 Hopkins, David. After Modern Art 1945-2017. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Cover Image. Steinmetz, Julia. “Aline’s Orchard.” City of LA Individual Artist Fellowships Exhibition Catalogue, 2018. David, Emmanuel. “The Art of Trans Politics.” Sage Journals 17, no. 1 (2018): pp. 82-85. Oberon Magazine. September, 2017. Braddock, Christopher. Animism in Art and Performance. London: Plagrave Macmillan, 2018. Motta, Carlos, John Arthur Peetz, and Carlos Maria Romero. The Spit! Manifesto Reader. London: Frieze Art Projects, 2018. Vaccaro, Jeanne. “Embodied Risk: Cassils”, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 5, no. 1 (2018): pp. 112-116. Steinbock, Eliza and Cassils. “On Propagating Collective Resilience in Times of War: A Conversation with Cassils,” Performance Matters 4, no. 3 (2018). http://performancematters-thejournal.com/ index.php/pm/article/view/109 Halberstam, Jack. “Unbuilding Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark,” Places Journal, October 2018. https://placesjournal.org/article/unbuilding- gender/ Krauss, Rosalind, Annette Michelson, George Baker, Yve-Alain Bois, et. al, eds. David “A Questionnaire on Monuments: 49 Responses,” October Magazine 165 (2018). Getsy, David J. “On Cassils,” Artforum, February 15, 2018. Posner, Jessica. “Artist as Alchemist: A Review of Cassils’s Monumental,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 5, no. 1 (2018): pp. 117-132. CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
Dhillon, Kim. “Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects,” Border Crossings 37, no. 3 (2018). Getsy, David J. “Cassils Swears To Be Your Citizen Artist.” Canadian Art, January 25, 2018. Newman, Emily L. Female Body Image in Contemporary Art: Dieting, Eating Disorders, Self-Harm, and Fatness. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Lambert, Cath. The Live Art of Sociology. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018. Mercer, Milena. Altered States: Substances in Contemporary Art. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Company KG, 2018 Riszko, Leila. “Trans/formative: Queering the Binaries of Sex and Gender in Cassils’s Performances of (Un)Becoming” The Drama Review 63, no. 4 (2018): pp. 94-107. https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/732374
2017 Tsaconas, E. Hella. “Bad math: calculating bodily capacity in Cassils’s Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory Volume 26, no. 2-3 (2017): pp. 197-207. Manshel, Hannah. “Breathing Material: Cassils and Xandra Ibarra in Los Angeles, 2 April 2016, The Broad, Los Angeles.” Women & Performance Journal: A Journal of Feminist Theory 27, no. 1 (2017): pp. 137-141.
2016 Steinmetz, Julia. “The Sound of Every Nightlife.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 3, no. 3 (2016).
2015 Cassils. Eindhoven, The Netherlands: MU, 2015. Jones, Amelia. “Materials Traces: Performativity, Artistic ‘Work,’ and New Concepts of Agency.” The Drama Review 59, no. 4 (2015): pp. 18-35. Bosold, Birgit, Dorothée Brill, and Detlef Weitz, eds. Homosexualität_en. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Schwules Museum, 2015. Cover image. Cassils, Heather and Clover Leary. “Mamaist Manifesto,” in Queer. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2015. Getsy, David J. “Abstraction and the Unforeclosed,” in Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Chang, Meiling and Gabrielle Cody, eds. Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres. London: Routledge, 2015. Miller, Em. “Making Space For Queer Dialogue,” The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art 54, no. 12-13 (2015).
2014 Doyle, Jennifer and David Getsy. “Queer Formalism: Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy in Conversation,” Art Journal Volume 72, no. 58-71 (2014): cover image. Hoetger, Megan. “Tiresias by Heather Cassils,” Performance Research Journal 19, no. 58-59 (2014). Cover image. Katz, Jonathan David, ed. Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History. New York: Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, 2014. Steinbock, Eliza. “Photographic Flashes: On Imaging Trans Violence in Heather Cassils’ Durational Art,” Photography & Culture 7, no. 3 (2014): pp. 253–268. Wickstrom, Maurya. “Desire and Kairos: Cassils’s Tiresias,” TDR/The Drama Review 58, no. 4 (2014): pp. 46-55 and cover image. CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
Press and Media Appearances 2020 Robinson, Andy. “Los Artistas Toman El Cielo... Contra Trump” La Vanguardia, July 10, 2020. Bobb, Brooke. “Look Up: 80 Artists Are Skywriting to Highlight the Injustice of Immigration Detention In America.” Vogue, July 7, 2020 https://www.vogue.com/article/in-plain-sight-skywriting-immigration-america Miranda, Carolina A. “Messages in Fourth of July Skies.” LA Times. July 7, 2020. https://www.dropbox.com/s/c9xon3mc3okf0xj/2020-07-07%20In%20Plain%20Sight%20 -%20LAT.pdf?dl=0 Bastow, Clem. “In Plain Sight skywriting project targets US culture of incarceration: ‘We have a brief moment of clarity.’” The Guardian. July 7, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jul/07/in-plain-sight-skywriting-project- targets-usculture-of-incarceration-we-have-a-brief-moment-of-clarity del Barco, Mandalit. “With Fleets Of Planes, Artists Take To Skies Nationwide To Protest Mass Detention. NPR. July 4, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/04/887129552/with-fleets-of- planes-artists-take-to-skies-nationwide-to-protest-mass-detention Small, Zachary. “Protesting U.S. Immigration Policies, Artists Aim for the Sky.” New York Times. July 4, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/arts/design/july-4-skytyping-skywriting- immigration.html Tayor, Kate. “Performance artist Cassils explores trans visibility through performance with clay,” The Globe and Mail, February 21, 2020. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and- architecture/article-performance-artist-cassils-explores-trans-visibility-through/ Grieg, James. “Photos that explore the male body beyond the perfectly sculpted ideal,” i-D, February 25, 2020. https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/k7enpx/photos-that-explore-the-male-body- beyond-the-perfectly-sculpted-ideal Frankel, Eddy. “ Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography review,” Time Out, February 18, 2020. https://www.timeout.com/london/art/masculinities-liberation-through-photography-review
2019 Osenlund, R. Kurt. “12 queer artists whose work is making us pay attenttion,” NBC NEWS, December 13, 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/12-queer-artists-whose-work- making-us-pay-attention-n1100646 Westall, Mark. “Wellcome Collection to open new permanent gallery,” Fad Magazine, July 22, 2019. https://fadmagazine.com/2019/07/22/wellcome-collection-to-open-new-permanent-gallery/ Bastow, Clem. “Inflatable penises, latex pigs and a Justin Bieber shrine: Dark Mofo’s wildest rides,” The Guardian (London, UK), June 19, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jun/19/ inflatable-penises-latex-pigs-and-a-justin-bieber-shrine-dark-mofos-wildest-rides Francis, Hannah. “Dark Mofo pushes trauma boundaries with self-immolation and VR violence,” Syndey Morning Herald (Sydney, UK), June 16, 2019. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/ art-and-design/self-immolation-and-vr-violence-provoke-audiences-at-dark-mofo-20190615- p51xzg.html Dow, Steve. “CASSILS,” VAULT Magazine, Issue 25, Feb 7, 2019. Nordeen, Bradford. “Blood in the Lung: Ron Athey, Cassils and Fanaa Conjure a Ritual Body at the Arizona Desert’s Biosphere 2,” Frieze, Jan 15 2019. https://frieze.com/article/blood-lung- ron-athey-cassils-and-fanaa-conjure-ritual-body-arizona-deserts-biosphere-2?language=en Eblen, Shannon. “Seeing the Past From the Future,” The New York Times, October 3, 2019. https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/arts/design/new-and-old-art-pafa.html CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
2018 Johnson, Kelley. “Cassils: Solutions at The Station Museum of Contemporary Art,” Houston Review, December 18, 2018. https://www.thehoustonreview.com/reviews/2018/12/18/cassils-solutions- at-the-station-museum-of-contemporary-art-kelly-johnson Moffit, Evan. “Black and Blue and Red All Over In Houston,” Frieze, Dec 4, 2018. https://frieze.com/ article/black-and-blue-and-red-all-over-houston “The Tattooist of Auscwitz, Billboard art and US politics, Emma Rise and Wise Children,” Front Row on BBC Radio 4 (London, UK), Friday, October 19, 2018. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ m0000sf9 Munoz, Maria. “Cassils/ El cuerpo como escultura social,” neo2.com, July 5, 2018. https://www.neo2. com/cassils-queer-art/ “Best of 2017: Our Top 20 Exhibitions Across the United States,” Hyperallergic, January 20, 2018. https://hyperallergic.com/417933/best-of-2017-our-top-20-exhibitions-across-the-united- states/ 2017 Small, Zachary. “These Trans and Queer Artists Are Challenging Popular Notions of Strength,” Artsy, October 17, 2017. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-trans-artists- challenging-popular-notions-strength Casals, Gonzalo. “What is the Most Iconic Artwork of the 21st Century?” Artnet, September 29, 2017. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/iconic-artworks-21st-century-1092800 Ryan, Hugh. “Cassils is Pissed”, OUT Magazine, September 26, 2017. https://www.out.com/art- books/2017/9/27/queer-artist-collected-200-gallons-urine-protest-federal-trans-bathroom- guidelines Sheets, Hilarie M. “Gender-Fluid Artists Come Out of the Gray Zone,” New York Times (New York, NY), September 15, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/arts/design/gender-fluid-artists- new-museum-transgender.html?mcubz=0 Michelson, Noah. “The Powerful Reason Why This Artist Has Been Saving His Urine for the Past 200 Days”, Huffington Post, September 16, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ cassils-monumental-pissed-urine_us_59bbeacee4b0edff971b88f4 Emenhiser-Harris, Karen. “A 1,900-Pound Sculpture Pushed Through the Streets of Omaha, in Tribute to Its LGBTQ History.” Hyperallergic, May 5, 2017. https://hyperallergic.com/377494/a-1900- pound-sculpture-pushed-through-the-streets-of-omaha-in-tribute-to-its-lgbtq-history/ Patel, Alpesh Kantilal. “Crtist’s pick: Omaha.” Artforum, May 9, 2017. Carpenter, Kim. “Art notes: Monumental Push: Heavy sculpture, heavy topic.” Omaha.com, April 27, 2017. https://www.omaha.com/go/art-notes-monument-push-heavy-sculpture-heavy-topic/ article_35eaaff3-25be-5188-b2e8-52b1849a1f4b.html Cassils. “Cassils’ ‘Resilience of the 20%’ World Premiere Set for Omaha.” By Corbin Hirschhorn. KVNO News, April 25, 2017. Lilla, Kristen. “Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts reveals three installations related to gender, identity.” The Daily Nonpareil (Iowa), February 9, 2017. Wittington, Lew. “Transgender Themes in Art and Dance at PAFA.” huffingtonpost.com, January 17, 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/transgender-themes-in-art-dance-at- pafa_b_587e6996e4b0b39899c71de1 Day, Gary. “The Inspiration That is Cassils.” Philadelphia Gay News (Philadelphia, PA), January 12, 2017. Frank, Priscilla “Artists Tackle Stale Ideas of Masculinity that Restrict People of All Genders.” huffingtonpost.com, January 11, 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/art-masculinity-queer- man-up-exhibition_n_5874ebe1e4b02b5f858b0bb0 Welles, Elenore. “The Ecstasy of Mary Shelley.” visualartsource.com, January 8, 2017. CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
2016 Campbell, Andy. “The Year in Performance.”Artforum, December (2016). Finkelstein, Avram and Hugh Ryan. “Ten Queer Reimaginings of New York’s ‘Gay Liberation Monument.” vice.com, December 23, 2016. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgv9b4/ten- queer-reimaginings-of-new-yorks-gay-liberation-monument Day, Gary. “Intimacy and Isolation in the Dark: Cassils at PAFA.” philadelphiadance.org, December 5, 2016. https://philadelphiadance.org/dancejournal/2016/12/05/intimacy-and-isolation-in-the- dark-cassils-at-pafa/ Cassils. “A Fiery Attack on Gender Norms: TCP Meets Cassils.” By The Creators Project. thecreatorsproject.vice.com, November 18, 2016. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz4xaz/ tcp-meets-cassils-fiery-attack-on-gender-norms McQuaid, Cate. “Finding the Gray in Black and White.” The Boston Globe (Boston, MA), September 29, 2016. Hopkins, Christopher Snow. “An Artist Attempts to Resensitize Us to Image of Violence.” hyperallergic. com, September 27, 2016. https://hyperallergic.com/325700/an-artist-attempts-to-resensitize- us-to-images-of-violence/ Melamed, Samantha. “Ghost Images.” The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA), August 19, 2016. Reinhard, Rebekka. “Frau, Mann, Oder? Ein Versuch zum Thema Transidentitaten.” Hohe Luft (Hamburg, Germany), September 2016. Louw, Gretta. “Dismantling the Myths of Sports.” hyperallergic.com, August 19, 2016. https:// hyperallergic.com/318337/dismantling-the-myths-of-sports/ Tschida, Anne. “Voices from the Margins.” Miami Herald (Miami, FL), July 29, 2016. https://www. miamiherald.com/entertainment/visual-arts/article92622952.html Stone, Jamal. “Artists Came Together to Form a Wholly Unique, Non-Partisan Super PAC.” milk.xyz, June 9, 2016. https://milk.xyz/feature/artists-came-together-to-form-a-wholly-unique-non- partisan-super-pac/ Greenberger, Alex. “Actual Revolution: Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery Transforms into Headquarters for an Artist-Run Super PAC.” artnews.com, June 8, 2016. http://www. artnews.com/2016/06/08/actual-revolution-chelseas-jack-shainman-gallery-transforms-into- headquarters-for-an-artist-run-super-pac/ Gavin, Francesca. “Cassils.” Kaleidoscope 27, Summer Issue, 2016. Durón, Maximiliano. “Ad for LGBTQ Show with Phot by Trans Artist Cassils is Banned by German Rail, Then Allowed.” artnews.com, May 12, 2016. http://www.artnews.com/2016/05/12/ad-for-lgbtq- show-with-photo-by-trans-artist-cassils-is-banned-by-german-rail-then-allowed/ Exhibitionists. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada), Season 1, Episode 24, April 17, 2016. Frank, Priscilla. “Trans Performance Artist Fights an Invisible Oppressor, But Who?” huffingtonpost. com, April 5, 2o16. Cassils. Press Play with Madeleine Brand. By Madeleine Brand. KCRW Radio, Los Angeles/Canada. April 1, 2016. Droitcour, Brian. “Transformers.” Spike Art Quarterly 47, Spring Issue (2016): pp. 138-146. Forman, Ross. “Transgender studies joins forces with art history in a new book from Chicagoan.” windycitymediagroup.com, March 2, 2016. http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/ Transgender-studies-joins-forces-with-art-history-in-new-book-from-Chicagoan/54468.html CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
2015 Manthrope, Rowland. “We Watched as an Artist Set Fire to Themselves on Stage.” wired.co.uk, November 20, 2015. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cassils-inextinguishable-fire-portrait-of- the-artist-on-fire Heyman, Stephen. “Cassils: Transgender Artist Goes to Extremes.” nytimes.com, November 18, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/arts/international/cassils-a-transgender-artist- goes-to-extremes.html Gardner, Lyn. “Artist Heather Cassils is set on fire – and opens our eyes to violence,” guardian.co.uk, November 9, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2015/nov/09/heather- cassils-inextinguishable-fire-spill-festival-national-theatre Blas, Zach and Cassils. “Queer Darkness.” Little Joe, Issue 5, 2015. Ralston, Ana Carolina. “Menina ou Menino?” Vogue Brasil, October 2015. Göbel, Malte. “Körper von Gewicht.” Siegessäule (Berlin, Germany), October 2015. Lankolainen, Eeva. “Pahin vihollinen on näkymätön.” Savon Sanomat (Kuipio, Finland), September 2, 2015. Johnson, Paddy. “Highlights from the Creative Capital Retreat: Part Two,” artfcity.com, August 21, 2015. http://artfcity.com/2015/08/21/highlights-from-the-creative-capital-retreat-part-two/ “Fire In The Belly: Trans Artist Cassils Immolates For Art,” huffingtonpost.com, June 4, 2015. https:// www.huffpost.com/entry/cassils-inextinguishable-fire_n_7505500 Teplitzky, Alex. “Cassils Takes On Fire and Ice,” blog.creative-capital.org, May 22, 2015. https:// creative-capital.org/2015/05/22/cassils-takes-on-fire-and-stone/ Miranda, Carolina A. “13 L.A. Artists Awarded Creative Capital Artist Grants,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), January 9, 2015. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et- cam-creative-capital-artist-grants-20150109-column.html
2014 Yeung, Peter. “The Artists Subverting the Gender Binary.” dazedigital.com, November 19, 2014. https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/22646/1/the-artists-subverting-the- gender-binnary Kellaway, Mitch. “Racy, Experimental Art from the Transgender Vanguard.” Advocate, August 2, 2014. https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2014/08/02/photos-racy-experimental-art- transgender-vanguard?page=0%2C0 Chun, Kimberly. “Projected Personae: Show Focuses On Human Body As Art Medium.” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, CA), July 23, 2014. https://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Projected- Personae-Show-focuses-on-human-body-5641930.php Mrakovčić, Matija. “Trans* Kao Stalno Postajanje.” Kulturpunkt.hr, June 27, 2014. https://www. kulturpunkt.hr/content/trans-kao-stalno-postajanje Brooks, Katherine. “A Survey Of Queer Feminist Artists Who Are Challenging Today’s Body Oppression.” huffingtonpost.com, June 19, 2014. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/after-our- bodies-meet_n_5501059 Frank, Priscilla. “10 Transgendered Artists Who Are Changing the Landscape of Contemporary Art.” huffingtonpost.com, March 26, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/26/trans- artists_n_5023294.html?utm_hp_ref=arts Schechter, Fran. “Body As Canvas: Videos Get Physical- Literally.” NOW Magazine, March 6, 2014. Cassils. CBC Radio. By Gill Deacon. CBC Radio (Toronto, Canada). February 12, 2014. CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
Residencies 2020 Fleck Fellowship & Residency, BANFF Centre for Arts and Creativity, BANFF, Canada 2019 MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH Bellagio Center, The Rockefeller Foundation, Lake Como, Italy 2018 Lucas Artists Residency Program, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA (2015-18) 2016 Artist in Residence, Sandra Kahn Alpert Visiting Artist Program, College of Visual and Performing Arts, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 2014 Thinker in Residence, SPILL International Festival of Performance, Ipswich, UK 2013 Inaugural Artist in Residence, Art Gallery, York University, Toronto, Canada 2010 Artist-Researcher in Residence, Los Angeles Goes Live: Exploring a Social History of Performance Art in Southern California, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA
Public Collections Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (Hard Times, link) Wellcome Trust, London, UK Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, NY
Awards, Grants, and Fellowships 2020 Andy Warhol (for In Plain Sight) Agnus Gund (for In Plain Sight) Krupp Family Foundation (for In Plain Sight) Quiet Foundation (for In Plain Sight) Center for Cultural Power (for In Plain Sight) Occidental College of the Arts (for In Plain Sight) Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (for In Plain Sight) Goodworks Foundation (for In Plain Sight) For Freedoms (for In Plain Sight) Canada Council for the Arts Explore and Create Grant Fleck Fellowship & Residency, BANFF Centre for Arts and Creativity, BANFF, Canada 2019 Fellowship, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Bellagio Center, Italy Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship, Theater Canada Council for the Arts Explore and Create Grant Canada Council for the Arts Touring Grant Canada Council for the Arts Travel Grant 2018 United States Artists Fellowship Canada Council for the Arts Explore and Create Grant Canada Council for the Arts Touring Grant Canada Council for the Arts Travel Grant CASSILS 2020 CURRICULUM VITAE
2017 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship COLA Individual Artist Fellowship Canada Council for the Arts Concept to Realization Grant Canada Council for the Arts Travel Grant 2016 Alpert Visiting Artist Fellowship, Syracuse University Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant 2015 Creative Capital Visual Artist Award Canada Council for the Arts Media Arts Grant Canada Council for the Arts Inter-Arts Touring Grant Canada Council for the Arts Inter-Arts Travel Grant 2014 Inaugural International Prize for Live Art, ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Finland Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship 2013 MOTHA Art Awards (Museum of Transgender Art) for Best Solo Exhibition Fellows of Contemporary Art Nominee 2012 Canada Council for the Arts, Long Term Assistance Grant to Visual Artists (2012-14) California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship