Performance artist Dawn Kasper 'always swirling'

The Los Angeles artist's latest work, the 'On' series, explores existential themes through what she calls 'visual poems.'

Dawn Kasper's first solo show out of graduate school, at Circus Gallery in 2007, was titled simply "Life and Death," which gives you some idea of the scope of her inquiry. Working in video, installation and performance primarily, she's made works exploring "Evil," "Love" and "Truth." She's currently working on a group called the "On" series — as in, "On Forgetting," "On Religion" "On Existence" — and another she's dubbed "Clues to the Meaning of Life."

She is an artist preoccupied, in other words, by the Big Questions, either unwilling or unable to home in on a more reasonable set of parameters. Her works, as a result, are generally quite messy: materially, thematically, emotionally. They leave stains and scars — sometimes literally; "residue" is a word she uses often — and rarely come to tidy conclusions. The effect for the viewer, however, can be exhilarating.

In conversation as well as in performance — and the line between the two appears none too distinct — Kasper has an eager, frenetic tone, the air of one struggling to get her head around a problem, continually tipping between revelation and bafflement. Thirty-three years old, with short, dark hair, expressive features and the intensity of a natural performer, she speaks as one who has too many thoughts in her head at once.

"I have so many ideas and so many interests," she says, "always swirling, and a short attention span and, oh my God — overwhelming sometimes."

Speaking in the bedroom that doubles as her studio in the Koreatown apartment she shares with a roommate, she describes her approach in quasi-scientific terms: She begins with a question or a hypothesis and undertakes a series of actions to answer that question, to prove or disprove that hypothesis. (The majority of her work is performance-based, or else — in the case of installations and photographs — generated out of her performances, though she makes drawings as well.)

The series for which she first became known in L.A., begun while in grad school in the New Genres program at UCLA , was rooted in the darkest of questions.

"I wanted to know what I looked like dead," she says.

She'd been obsessed with horror films, serial killers and Weegee's tabloid photographs, making videos and installations that mimicked crime scene investigations. After a while she began to use her own body, staging live dioramas that simulated her demise in disturbingly and sometimes absurdly gory ways.