Cassils’s work positions their body as both the raw material and protagonist of their performances. For the Canadian-born, New York- and Los Angeles-based artist, performance is a form of social sculpture, reflecting how bodies are shaped by external forces and social expectations. Cassils's art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival and empowerment. Employing a myriad of visual tactics—outlines and silhouettes, solar exposures, retinal burns, flashes, and Rorschach devices—the artist aims to complicate the conditions of trans* visibility in a moment of heightened violence.

Movements transposes the live choreography of Cassils’s debut contemporary dance piece, Human Measure (2022), reconceiving that performance as three new immersive installations that are distinct yet interconnected. Drawing upon the structure of a musical score, the exhibition weaves layered auditory experiences into a sweeping soundscape that spans the galleries’ architecture.

At its core, the exhibition interrogates the act of recording and preserving performance, questioning how the body is framed, mediated, and ultimately reinterpreted. Through cinematic approaches—whether in the motion of the frame or the stylistic choices that shape it—Movements examines how formal decisions affect our understanding of trans* subjectivity. Here, movement is not only physical but reverberates socially, politically, and physiologically, shifting between the intimate and the public, the seen and the unseen.

Each movement occupies a single gallery and explores a world. Movement I (Human Measure) draws on the legacies of experimental film by transforming dance documentation into an abstraction. Movement II (Half Life) silhouettes bodies performing rites of life and death against the shimmering dunes of White Sands National Park. Movement III (Etched in Light, National Mall, Washington DC) documents a sonic and visual performance created in collaboration with the National Center for Transgender Equality on the Transgender Day of Visibility (March 31, 2024), presented alongside a sixty-foot cyanotype made during this participatory event.

Movements disrupts the process of looking, compelling viewers to become conscious of their gaze. By challenging the assumption that looking is neutral, Cassils opens a space for deeper inquiry, where questions of perception, power, and representation intersect. Through this disruption, the installations invite us to reconsider how we see, revealing the politics embedded in the very act of witnessing.

THANK YOU

Movements is generously supported by the SITE SANTA FE Board of Directors, the SITE SANTA FE Exhibitions Fund, and Lilly Wachowski.

Additional support provided by the City of Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department and the 1% Lodgers Tax; and New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment of the Arts.