There's a bit of a stir about Lady Gaga's girl-on-girl groping in her latest creative endeavor. The "Telephone" video, which takes place in a women's prison and has an ironic-grindhouse kind of esthetic, features Canadian artist Heather Cassils as Gaga's diesel girlfriend. Gawker recently published an interesting interview with Cassils, whom they called "awesome-looking." And, frankly, she is—in the truest sense of the word.Cassils is a performance artist who uses her body as a medium. "I see the construction of my physique as a performance," she says, "which purposely toys with the traditional process of Greek sculptors, who were said to find their ideal form by chipping away at a block of marble and discarding any unnecessary material. I see my body as a conceptual sculpture, a critique of the social pressure we feel to make our bodies conform to an aesthetic, binary gendered and cultural ideal." Say it, sister.
Of her appearance, she says she likes to fashion herself after Tom of Finland's artwork (which inspired the Village People style and introduced a bit of leather culture to the mainstream.)
Cassils also says of her experience being androgynous in the world: "People have all sorts of reactions to my body, within the context of my art work as well as being out in the world. When I lived in London, I had a group of people pull their car over to ask me what gender I was, they just had to know, because the in between was too much for them."
