Dawn Kasper: WISH WANT WISH

About

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.”— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

Saturday, April 9th at The Emily Harvey Foundation, ISSUE Project Room presents Dawn Kasper’s WISH WANT WISH, a new improvisational performance composition evoking historical references to the philosophy of desire. Objects, storytelling, and sound function as a social sculpture explored in duration. Musical instruments and props reveal patterns drawn between theoretical questions of desire. Documentation becomes data collection; data collection becomes composition; composition becomes sound; sound then becomes archived. The residue of the performance action remains. 

Dawn Kasper 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, and monologue. Her work has been exhibited widely; The Migros Museum, Zurich (2005), Human Resources, LA (2011), Tramway, Glasgow (2012), 2012 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2012), David Lewis, NY (2014), ADN Collection, Bolzano, Italy (2014), Redling Fine Art, LA (2015), Tang Museum, Skidmore College, NY (2015) and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR (2015). Kasper is represented by Redling Fine Art in Los Angeles and David Lewis in New York. 

Organized by Lawrence Kumpf.