Dawn Kasper

Saturday, September 15th, ISSUE presents an evening with legendary composer-performer Charlemagne Palestine performing alongside stalwart NYC poet Steve Dalachinsky as a part of the 2018 Brooklyn Book Festival, co-presented with BOMB Magazine. Interdisciplinary artist and 2015 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Dawn Kasper opens the evening, enacting part two of a new improvisation titled A, B, C : 0, 1, 2, 3.

Dawn Kasper (b.1977, Fairfax, Virginia) is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working in performance, installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, video and sound. Her work emerges out of a fascination with existentialism, subjects of vulnerability, desire, and the construction of meaning. Kasper often critiques the corporatized aspects of culture by examining the emotions most commonly manipulated by advertisers and media such as fear, panic, hate, envy, lust, and anxiety. Creating scenes that double as a platform for living sculpture, Kasper performs in a structured yet spontaneous manner using props, costume, comedy, gesture, extreme physicality, repetition, music and monologue. Kasper’s “Nomadic Studio Practice” experiment turned her studio into the work, building on the legacy of Kaprow, Fluxus, and Cage to create a place for durational performance, improvisation, and a permanent blurring of the boundaries between art and life. A version of this work, called “This Could Be Something If I Let It,” was shown in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, which saw Kasper move into the museum for the duration of the exhibition. A new and expanded variation, called “The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars” was included in the 2017 Venice Biennale in Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Macel, which saw Kasper move into the Sala Chini in the Central Pavilion for the 6-month durational performative installation.