The Body as Battlefield, the Body as Monument
In a contemporary art world saturated with images, Cassils stands out not by offering more representations, but by forcing us to confront the body itself as a site of violence, resistance, transformation, and spectacle.
- The commodification of queer bodies
- State violence
- The trauma of erasure
- And the fragile tension between empowerment and vulnerability
Cassils does not offer passive images for consumption; they demand that the audience confront the visceral materiality of existence itself.
Who Is Cassils?
Cassils was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1975, and trained in both art and competitive athletics. This dual foundation would become essential to their artistic practice, where physical discipline and conceptual rigor coexist.
Unlike many artists who "represent" trans narratives, Cassils embodies them, turning their own body into a living, constantly shifting medium. Their performances are not fictionalized or symbolic. They are real acts of bodily endurance, captured through video, photography, sculpture, and installation.
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| Cassils - Body of Work |
As a transmasculine, non-binary artist, Cassils resists the comfort of fixed gender categories. They situate themselves within trans and queer histories but also create a space where trauma, aggression, and survival are viscerally enacted.
The Central Themes in Cassils’ Art
Cassils' practice engages deeply with multiple overlapping themes that define the political and philosophical core of their work:
- The trans body as sculptural material- Violence and systemic oppression
- Institutional control over bodies
- Visibility vs. invisibility in queer and trans life
- The aesthetics of trauma and survival
- The spectacle of masculinity
- The intersection of performance, endurance, and protest
- Media manipulation and the consumption of queer pain
In Cassils’ art, the body is not simply the subject, it is the arena of struggle itself.
Key Works by Cassils
To fully appreciate Cassils, one must closely examine their most iconic works, each of which functions as a physical, political, and emotional confrontation.
"Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture" (2011)
One of Cassils’ earliest landmark works, this performance involved gaining 23 pounds of muscle over 23 weeks through an intensive weight-training and nutrition regimen. The work references Eleanor Antin’s 1972 piece Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, where Antin documented her body shrinking through weight loss.
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| Cassils - Cuts - Timelapse |
Cassils reversed this narrative, rather than reducing, they built muscle, challenging traditional notions of femininity, masculinity, and body art.
"Cuts" is about self-determination, but also about how trans bodies are constantly under surveillance, judged, and medicalized. Cassils sculpts not marble or clay, but their own living tissue, turning the body into both sculpture and statement.
"Becoming an Image" (2012–ongoing)
Perhaps Cassils' most powerful and widely recognized performance. In a pitch-black room, the artist repeatedly strikes a 2,000-pound clay block. A photographer captures each impact through brief bursts of flash, allowing the audience to witness fleeting fragments of the violent encounter.
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| Cassils - Becoming an Image |
This work references:
- Hate crimes against trans people- Media fascination with trans trauma
- The impossibility of fully representing trans experience
"Becoming an Image" is a brutal, haunting meditation on violence and visibility, where the audience becomes complicit in witnessing the spectacle of pain, but never fully grasping its totality.
"Resilience of the 20%" (2016)
In this sculptural installation, Cassils cast the clay used in Becoming an Image into monolithic bronze blocks, permanent objects that symbolize the physical and emotional residue of the performance.
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| Cassilis - Resilience of the 20% |
The title references the statistic that trans people experience dramatically higher rates of violence and discrimination. The bronze casts become literal monuments to resilience, turning trauma into lasting materiality.
"PISSED" (2017)
For this deeply political work, Cassils collected 200 gallons of their own urine over 200 days, the length of time it took for the Trump administration to rescind federal protections for trans students in U.S. schools.
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| Cassils - Pissed |
The accumulated urine was displayed in a massive glass tank, offering a visceral commentary on state-sanctioned transphobia and bodily autonomy.
"PISSED" transforms abjection into confrontation: the state may attempt to regulate trans bodies, but here the body pushes back, literally and symbolically.
"Inextinguishable Fire" (2015)
In this intense video work, Cassils stages a full-body burn, collaborating with Hollywood stunt professionals. They endure a 14-second burn, referencing both cinematic spectacle and real-life political violence (including self-immolations as protest).
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| Cassils - Inextinguishable Fire |
By subjecting their body to actual physical danger, Cassils challenges the consumption of trauma as entertainment and forces the audience to confront the real stakes of queer and trans survival.
The Violence of Representation: Trans Bodies as Political Terrain
What sets Cassils apart is their profound critique of how trans bodies are often framed by media, politics, and even the art world itself.
In many contexts, trans narratives are reduced to:
- Trauma porn: stories that fetishize victimhood- Medical fascination: focusing on surgeries or "before and after" narratives
- Assimilationist visibility: celebrating trans people only when they conform to binary standards of beauty or success
Cassils refuses all of these simplifications. Instead, they offer performances that leave the viewer deeply uncomfortable, questioning their own voyeurism, their complicity in consuming the pain of others, and their assumptions about what trans art should be.
The Subtle Queer and Gay Current
While Cassils primarily works from a trans and non-binary perspective, their work sits firmly within queer and gay art traditions that have long explored the body, eroticism, trauma, and violence.
There are echoes of:
- David Wojnarowicz’s confrontation with state violence- Nan Goldin’s documentation of queer intimacy and suffering
- Ron Athey’s performances of pain and catharsis
- General queer performance art’s subversion of bodily norms
Cassils continues the queer tradition of using the body as a radical site of both pleasure and protest. They bridge gay and trans histories, making visible the shared structures of marginalization and resilience.
The Sculptural Trans Body: Beyond Metaphor
Cassils challenges even the language we use to discuss trans embodiment. In their practice, the trans body is not "a metaphor for transformation" but a real material undergoing real physical labor.
Their muscularity, training, bruises, cuts, burns, and scars are not allegorical symbols — they are actual outcomes of political and physical confrontation.
In this way, Cassils reclaims agency from both art spectators and medical narratives, proposing a materialist vision of transition: not a "journey of self-discovery" for consumption, but an ongoing battle for self-determination in hostile systems.
International Recognition and Exhibitions
Cassils’ work has been widely exhibited and praised globally, including:
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Guggenheim Museum, New York
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Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
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Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami
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Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
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The Broad, Los Angeles
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Palais de Tokyo, Paris
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Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
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Art Basel Miami
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Venice Biennale (participating events)
Their growing institutional recognition reflects the art world’s increasing engagement with trans artists who refuse tokenization and instead offer difficult, necessary, and urgent works.
Why Cassils Matters in Contemporary Art
We live in a world where:
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Trans lives remain under legislative and physical attack globally
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The spectacle of trans pain is often consumed without real empathy
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The body itself has become a contested political battlefield
In this brutal context, Cassils' work feels almost prophetic. Their art doesn’t comfort, it wounds, confronts, and insists that we witness the violence trans people endure, but also the staggering resilience they embody.
Cassils shows that survival is not passive, it is active, embodied labor.
The Art of Endurance, the Ethics of Witnessing
Cassils’ art is not beautiful in a conventional sense. It is necessary. In every performance, every endurance piece, every sculptural fragment, they force us to reckon with the violence that lies beneath the sanitized narratives of trans visibility.
By sculpting their own flesh, by enduring danger, by rejecting simple representation, Cassils elevates the trans body from symbol to monumental truth.
They remind us that art is not merely to be seen, it is to be felt, endured, and survived.
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