Heather Cassils
Heather Cassils is a gender non-conforming, trans-masculine visual artist (they/them/ their pronouns) and has recently been named as one of ten transgender artists changing the landscape of contemporary art. From their home in Montreal, Cassils explores the human body as ‘social sculpture’. By pushing the body to physical extremes, their art inhabits performance, photography, sculpture and video, allowing the audience to witness themes of struggle and occasionally graphic violence through their work. Cassils embraces the slipperiness of trans identity in their work. Rather than squeezing their art into a framework of rigid heterosexual binaries, Cassils welcomes it in all its wonderful complexity. Gender is performed as a continual process of ‘becoming’. Concepts are stretched to breaking point, with sweat, blood and sinew adding to the construction of each performance, leaving the audience with a graphic but impactful depiction of both art and gender.
103 Shots
Upon the recent anniversary of the tragic Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, where dozens of innocent LGBT+ men and women lost their lives, Cassils’ short film ‘103 Shots’ confronts the attack through art and performance with bodies and balloons being used throughout. Having spoken to one of the survivors of the event itself, Cassils visually constructs one of the survivors’ initial thoughts that the gunshots were just celebratory noises of popping balloons:
“You’re sitting there having a great time at a club and you hear what sounds like fireworks popping and you assume it’s part of the show.”
The video shows various couples locked in an embrace, with nothing but a balloon between their stomachs separating them. As the embrace becomes stronger, the balloon finally bursts under the pressure. 103 shots, 103 embraces, one for each life lost. The watcher is left feeling shocked and brutalised by the popping – resembling a fusillade – as they enter the vacuum that so many of the victims of Orlando must have felt in the aftermath of the shooting.
Art like this becomes even more important in our present political and social climate. It represents not only what happened last year in Orlando, but captures the senses and anxieties felt by those caught in the midst of terror attacks across the globe. Though there’s no denying that a sudden loud noise in a public space will cause people to panic, Cassils’ art reminds us that, as terrorism seems to perforate more and more into everyday life, resisting fear becomes the ultimate act of rebellion.
“You’re sitting there having a great time at a club and you hear what sounds like fireworks popping and you assume it’s part of the show.”