Studio A: Douglas Dare & April Dawn Alison

 

In this event originally staged live at The Premises Studios, Hackney, in September 2020, musician and artist Douglas Dare performs three new pieces inspired by the late April Dawn Alison, a Californian photographer who created a vast body of self-portraits as their female persona. With a discussion by Erin O’Toole, curator at SFMOMA, Michael Mack, and Robert Raths, founder of Erased Tapes. A concept by Claudine Boeglin, Dandy Vagabonds.

Thursday 29 April
19:00 BST, London
14:00 EDT, New York

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Find out more about Douglas Dare's latest album Milkteeth, available to buy here

About April Dawn Alison

Made over the course of some thirty years, the photographs in this book depict the many faces of April Dawn Alison, the female persona of an Oakland, California based photographer who lived in the world as a man. This previously unseen body of self-portraits, which was given to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2017, begins tentatively in 1970s in black-and-white, and evolves in the 80s into an exuberant, wildly colourful, and obsessive practice inspired by representations of women in classic film, BDSM pornography and advertising. A singular, long-term exploration of a non-public self, the archive contains photographs that are beautiful, hilarious, enigmatic, and heartbreakingly sad, sometimes all at once.

With essays by Hilton Als (American writer and theater critic for The New Yorker), Zackary Drucker (American transgender multimedia artist, LGBT activist, actress and producer of smash Amazon series Transparent) and Erin O’Toole (associate curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).

Find out more and order copies of the book here.