Listed by the Huffington Post as “one of ten transgender artists who are changing the landscape of contemporary art,” Cassils has achieved international recognition for a rigorous engagement with the body as a form of social sculpture. Featuring a series of bodies transformed by strict physical training regimes, Cassils’ artworks offer shared experiences for contemplating histories of violence, representation, struggle, and survival. Cassils juxtaposes the immediacy, urgency and ephemerality of live performance against constructed acts for camera. Bashing through binaries, Cassils performs transgender not as a crossing from one sex to another but rather as a continual process of becoming. Drawing on conceptualism, feminism, body art, gay male aesthetics, Cassils forges a series of powerfully trained bodies for different performative purposes. It is with sweat, blood and sinew that Cassils constructs a visual critique around ideologies and histories. Cassils’ work has been exhibited widely including the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MU in Eindhoven, Holland, and the National Theatre in London. They received a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and a MOTHA award. Their films have premiered at Sundance Film Festival and the Institute for Contemporary Art in London.