"I wanted to see what I would look like dead"

For the last six years, Dawn Kasper has been enacting scenes of her own death. For the first time, the photographs of all of these endeavors will be presented in a single exhibition.

Circus Gallery brings to you, in life and in death, Dawn Kasper

death. Dawn Kasper has died many times. She was impaled, smashed, choked, and her body decomposed, rotted, and bled. Kasper looked at death in the face and reenacted it. Many many times. In so many varieties, that what we are now left with is the question of her mortality, in portraits, compositions rendered with painstaking grace and detail, the trail of blood is the artist reckoning with human experience and the question of whether or not the experience of death was real.

life. Dawn Kasper is alive. In life Kasper is an artist who continues to use her body as a vessel for connecting ideas, surface for transformation, and as her machinery for invention. She has begun a new body of work that embraces and at the same time questions what it means to be alive, the meaning of her own existence as a human being in the world.

A graduate of the UCLA MFA New Genres program she has shown nationally and internationally. In Los Angeles, she has shown her work at Anna Helwing Gallery, Angles Gallery, Track 16 and Circus Gallery among many others. She was invited to perform at the Migros Museum Für Genenwartskunst, in Zurich, Switzerland for the opening of the now legendary "When Humor Becomes Painful."