Cassils is a visual and performance artist, body builder, and personal trainer from Montreal, Quebec, Canada now based in Los Angeles, California, United States.
NSCAD's unconventional curriculum (where figure drawing classes included nude models jumping on a trampoline) and its faculty (in particular Jan Peacock and Garry Neil Kennedy) influenced their early political and feminist work in video and performance.
In collaboration with artist Dorit Margrieter, they created the 16mm film 10104 Angelo View Drive, a work set in John Lautner's modernist Sheats-Goldstein Residence in Beverly Hills exploring the relationship between architecture and desire.
This project was featured in solo exhibitions at Art Basel Miami Beach and at MUMOK, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006), as well as at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, Canada (2008).
The Toxic Titties' work received critical attention from significant scholars such as Amelia Jones,[15] Jennifer Doyle,[16] Christine Ross,[17] and José Esteban Muñoz.
[citation needed] Many of these scholars first encountered the work of the Toxic Titties when Cassils and Leary were hired to perform in Vanessa Beecroft's VB46 at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills.
Undermining power structures of identity, class, feminism and art commerce, Toxic Titties hijacked Beecroft's piece by engaging the female performers, who had been homogenized and objectified, in critical dialogue.
They documented this performance through the essay Behind Enemy Lines: Toxic Titties Infiltrate Vanessa Beecroft published in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society (2006), and reprinted in Art Metropole's Commerce By Artists[18] (2011).
During the live performance they used their body heat to melt a neoclassical Greek male torso carved out of ice, recasting the myth of Tiresias as a story of endurance and transformation.
In 2010, Cassils was awarded a Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Artist Research Grant as part of LACE's contribution to Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty with arts institutions across Southern California, showcasing cultural production from 1945 to 1980.
Cassils created Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, a large body of work that began with a six-month durational performance and generated video installations, photographs, watercolors, and a magazine.
[36] It is a key subject of Lianne McTavish's book Feminist Figure Girl: Look Hot While You Fight The Patriarchy (2015),[37] and was featured in the publication Art and Queer Culture by Richard Meyer and Catherine Lord (2013).
[54] Becoming an Image was reviewed positively on the cover of the arts section of The Guardian newspaper in London, UK (2013),[55] as well as in publications including The Huffington Post,[56] The Daily Beast,[57] Artsy Editorial,[58] and C File Magazine,[59] and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).