read this interview with Heather Cassils: Lady Gaga’s Prison Yard Girlfriend Heather is a radical performance artist… I started off as a painter and a drawer, but I now do performance art, and I know that sounds absolutely terrifying, like you imagine people shoving yams up their asses, but I think of my work as moving paintings essentially. There aren’t a lot of massive, sweeping actions. It’s more like I use the fact that the image is live to try to capture and transfix people, because people can walk away from a painting. I do portraits of sorts. I recently got funding through the Franklin Furnace, which is the largest nonprofit performance art fund in New York City to do this piece called “Hard Times,” which is kind of my portrait of the current culture of California. It features me — I train really, really hard so that I get really beefy and really ripped in a kind of scary way, and I do this performance on a really, really high piece of building scaffolding. I’m basically wearing a blonde Farrah Fawcett wig and a coral body thong. Basically, I do these body building poses but I slow them down incredibly, and I transfer from pose to pose so slowly that I create a nervous system overload — the entire body starts to quake and then the scaffolding does too. And when I turn around, you see that I have this prosthetic mask on that looks like my eyes have been removed from my head, and I have this soundtrack that I composed with a sound designer friend of mine, which is made up of 12 to 20 different wattages of just raw power — like literally the sound of electric power — and I mix all of that together and do this piece that basically, to me, is a portrait of California in this kind of economic crisis and this need to uphold the beautiful and the superficial in a place where we are rotting from the inside out in a lot of different ways. So I wanted to create this image that plays with the expectation of this beautiful woman that you’re going to see, and then you get something else. And all of it is using a lot of tropes from film because I live in Hollywood.

read this interview with Heather Cassils: Lady Gaga’s Prison Yard Girlfriend

Heather is a radical performance artist…

I started off as a painter and a drawer, but I now do performance art, and I know that sounds absolutely terrifying, like you imagine people shoving yams up their asses, but I think of my work as moving paintings essentially. There aren’t a lot of massive, sweeping actions. It’s more like I use the fact that the image is live to try to capture and transfix people, because people can walk away from a painting. I do portraits of sorts. I recently got funding through the Franklin Furnace, which is the largest nonprofit performance art fund in New York City to do this piece called “Hard Times,” which is kind of my portrait of the current culture of California. It features me — I train really, really hard so that I get really beefy and really ripped in a kind of scary way, and I do this performance on a really, really high piece of building scaffolding. I’m basically wearing a blonde Farrah Fawcett wig and a coral body thong. Basically, I do these body building poses but I slow them down incredibly, and I transfer from pose to pose so slowly that I create a nervous system overload — the entire body starts to quake and then the scaffolding does too. And when I turn around, you see that I have this prosthetic mask on that looks like my eyes have been removed from my head, and I have this soundtrack that I composed with a sound designer friend of mine, which is made up of 12 to 20 different wattages of just raw power — like literally the sound of electric power — and I mix all of that together and do this piece that basically, to me, is a portrait of California in this kind of economic crisis and this need to uphold the beautiful and the superficial in a place where we are rotting from the inside out in a lot of different ways. So I wanted to create this image that plays with the expectation of this beautiful woman that you’re going to see, and then you get something else. And all of it is using a lot of tropes from film because I live in Hollywood.

Tags: economic crisis queer performance art the body lady gaga