Artist Spotlight: Cassils & Eleanor Antin

The Canadian Artist Cassils’ uses their own body as their canvas, examining and critiquing concept of gender, and its limitations. In the work named ‘Time-lapse’, Cassils undergoes extreme physical change, as they work through a muscle building transformation. This transformation is documented a collage of 25 images, showing the start, middle and end of the transformation. There are four of these collages, one for the front, one for the back, and one for each side. The inspiration for this piece came from another artist; Eleanor Antin. More specifically, Antin’s piece ‘Carving: A traditional Sculpture’, which shows the progression of Antins body as she crash dieted for 45 days to reach “a point of aesthetic satisfaction’’, demonstrating the extremes of body image, and how unnatural what society deems to be ‘good’ can be. Cassils’ work however, focus’ on the gender based boundaries, as they build and shape their body to a masculine ideal, the antethsis of Antin’s work.

The simple black and white photographs that both artists use to show the progression and change is a technique that I will draw inspiration from, as they remind me of a film reel laid out, with each frame side by side, showing the transition of the video. Similarly, it looks like the raw image files from the animation Project I worked on, before they had been assembled into the software that played them back to back, creating the animation. If one could repeat that process, with the photos taken by Cassils and Antin before them, one would be able to watch the body shift and change shape to fit a different aesthetic. I can use this to show the effect of social media on a profile, as an image can steadily become distorted and change. This can represent the gradual effect of how we change ourselves online in reality, as a response to the rules that exist online.

(this is an extract from my essay)