Performance of “Becoming An Image” & Lecture at the University of Wisconsin

Cassils_Becoming _An _Image_Madison4
Becoming An Image, University of Madison, WI. Photo By Cassils with Timothy Hughes

“Negations and Negativities: Queer Theory’s Political Ante” The Center for Visual Cultures Theory-in-Practice Lab. on February 17 and 18, 2015. University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Becoming An Image, University of Wisconsin- Madison. Feb 17th. 

Find out more info here: http://www.visualculture.wisc.edu/302.htm

Performance: Becoming an Image
Tuesday, Feb 17, 7:00 PM
Fredric March Play Circle Theater
Becoming an Image is a piece that works at the interstices of performance, photography, and sculpture. Cassils unleashes an attack on a 2000-pound clay block. Delivering a series of kicks and blows in total darkness, the spectacle is illuminated only by the flash of a photographer, burning the image into the viewer’s retina.
Ghost: A Workshop with Cassils
Wednesday, Feb 18, 12:00PM – 2:00PM
Limited availability, and application required. Apply here. Applications due by February 4, 2015.
For this workshop, students will be able to engage directly with Cassils on performance tactics, and how the evidence and traces of events become their own documentation. Participants will also be able to experience Ghost, “a 4-channel sound installation which recreates the sounds of the artist’s breath, blows, grunts, and pulse rate during one performance of Becoming An Image. We hear Cassils darting from one corner to the other and circling the listener like a ghost.”
Artist’s Talk

Wednesday, Feb 18, 7:00 PM
Location: Elvehjem L150
Cassils is an artist who uses the physical body as sculptural mass with which to rupture societal norms. Cassils performs trans not as something about a crossing from one sex to another, but rather as a continual becoming, a process-oriented way of being that works in a space of indeterminacy, spasm, and slipperiness. Forging a series of powerfully trained bodies for different performative and formal purposes, it is with sweat, blood, and sinew that Cassils constructs a visual critique and discourse around physical and gendered ideologies and histories.
Sponsored by the Center for Visual Cultures. Co-sponsored by Art History. Organized in conjunction with The Wet Archive. Funded by the UW-Madison Anonymous Fund.