Dawn Kasper reviewed Artforum.com

Gallery News October 4, 2008 HUBBY's CoTour October 2, 2008 Bankhead in Otis 90th aniversery show. September 24, 2008 Mirror Mirror, Circus Gallery Project space September 23, 2008 Jame Krone, Reviewed in Art US September 19, 2008 Rachel Mason's "Kissing President Bush" on display at the Park September 11, 2008 Sarah Cromarty reviewed in LA Weekly September 11, 2008 Dawn Kasper @ Co-Lab, Copenhagen September 10, 2008 Artillery Joins Circus for Art Debate Series September 10, 2008 Art Walk To Include Circus Gallery August 22, 2008 It's a Celebration %?(#&$! at Burning Man and Circus Gallery

November 19, 2007 Dawn Kasper "life and death." reviewed on Artforum.com by Matthew Wilder There are moments, looking at new art in Los Angeles, when one feels trapped in some cosmic-joke undergraduate thesis without end—a purgatory of the puerile. It’s exactly this quality that makes Dawn Kasper’s “Life and Death,” guest-curated by Rosanna Albertini for Circus Gallery, so cagy, so catchy, so eerily on the nose. The show’s highlights are videos of Kasper’s performances as her signature character—a frenetic, mile-a-minute stream-of-consciousness riffer on the meaning and unmeaning of life. A frowsier, more academic, more down-market cousin of Sarah Silverman’s chirping, racist naïf, “Dawn” makes wildly associative flowcharts that connect her most vaguely related perceptions in a schizo style familiar to those who have seen The L Word’s infamous “hookup chart.” Kasper’s character is a philosophizing show-off with a hint of Asperger syndrome, a nutty-professor variation on Karen Finley’s yam-crammer persona. Rather than trying to play overly grown-up, jargon-laden, or wise, like most of her youthful cohorts in this city, Kasper flaunts a deliberately callow cheesiness—and a planklike indifference to the response of her audience. In a separate series of photographs, she literalizes adolescent acting out by painting her face zombie white, coating herself in buckets of blood, and staging absurdly theatrical car wrecks that suggest a bright, introverted teenage girl’s simultaneous excitement about Cindy Sherman and Herschell Gordon Lewis. “Life and Death” is like a self-dramatizing goth chick’s sixth-period notebook come to blazing life; it even includes a pitchfork stabbed into a wall that suggests a very close run-in with the devil. Is Kasper’s jabberjaw shtick a highly advanced form of irony, like Peaches, only more refined, or merely an expression of morbid self-attention and attention deficit disorder? Either way, her student-gone-wild routine short-circuits the received idea of the precocious artist, foregrounding a feckless motormouthed intensity over the usual phony poise. The glee of her manic dorkiness is rebelliously infectious. Link to article http://www.artforum.com/picks/section=la#picks18945