20 September - 11 December 2011
|
| Dash Snow |
| |
DASH SNOW
20 September 2011 - 11 December 2011
Dash Snow was born in 1981 in New York City, where he lived and worked
until his death in 2009. He emerged alongside young American artists Dan
Colen, Ryan McGinley, Nate Lowman and Agathe Snow (his former wife),
whose overlapping downtown practices quickly gained traction in the art
world. More than that of his peers, Snow’s work is marked by a strange
and insistent sentimentality. Even in the raw images of his earliest
Polaroid photographs, whose frequent subject matter is the filth of the
city and the derelict lives it contains, any sense of sensationalism is
dissipated by Snow’s palpable nostalgia. The most debased image is
linked to the most beautiful by an underlying humor and tenderness.
Many have noted that Snow himself seemed to have belonged to an
historical moment long prior to his own. Everything, from the way he
looked, to his anarchic political views, to his distrust of new
technology, belied a disdain for the age of the Internet and hawkish
American government, which he saw as the enemy of both privacy and
nuance. It follows that Snow’s greatest artistic influences sprang from
progressive, countercultural eras: the Dadaists of the 1920s, such as
Hannah Höch and Max Ernst, as well as 1960s California assemblage
artists like Bruce Conner and Wallace Berman. Quickly expanding from
Polaroid and 35mm photography, Snow began to make collages from his
collections of old books, newspapers, pulp magazines and pornography, as
well as assemblage and installation incorporating hoarded materials
from his living space: found junk, antiques, furniture, record albums,
cigarette butts and drug paraphernalia.
In 2007, Snow and his partner, Jade Berreau, had a baby daughter,
Secret, and the artist’s work accordingly turned toward his young
family. The piece on view here, Sisyphus, Sissy Fuss, Silly Puss (2009),
is one of the last he completed before his death. Shot on five reels of
Super8 film at dusk, or "magic hour,” in uninhabited fields, gravel
pits and wooded glens in upstate New York, the piece follows Jade and
Secret, both nude except for the woman’s leather and metal vest. The
title derives from images in the film of the two figures making their
way up precarious mounds of rock and dirt like the eponymous
mythological king (doomed for eternity to push his boulder up a hill
only to watch it roll back down). Typically for his practice, the piece
was not "edited” in the traditional sense – there was no postproduction
"cutting and splicing,” just Snow’s manual stops and starts during the
original filming. In fact, Snow even left the order in which the reels
were connected to the random determination of the lab that processed
them. The effect is to underscore Snow’s compulsion to be the guardian
of moments, rather than being their master-creator. His work as a whole
reflects on the possibility and impossibility of keeping these moments
alive and protected.
The works of Dash Snow (born in New York in 1981. Died in New York in
2009) are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American
Art in New York, the Fundación/Colección Jumex, Ecatepec, Mexico and the
Saatchi Gallery in London. After his death, his works have been shown
in several exhibitions around the world. Amongst the most recent shows
are Parallel Perceptions at the New York City Opera in New York (2011);
New York Minute: 60 Artisti della scena newyorchese, MACRO Future, Rome
(2009); Scorpio's Garden, curated by Kirstine Roepstorff at the
Temporare Kunsthalle in Berlin (2009); Babylon. Myth and Truth, at the
Pergamon Museum in Berlin (2008); Materialized: New American Video
and..., curated by Kathy Grayson at the Bergen Kunsthalle (2008).
The exhibition of Dash Snow is part of Three Amigos, a project by
Massimo De Carlo which includes three different solo shows in Rome by
Dan Colen (Palazzo Rospigliosi, via XXIV Maggio 43, Roma - until
9.10.2011) and Nate Lowman(American Academy in Rome, via Angelo Masina 5
- until 11.10.2011).
www.massimodecarlo.it
|