Selected Press

The Brant Foundation’s Dash Snow Exhibition Revisits the Art and Life of a Downtown Icon

Recalling the Outlaw Eye of Dash Snow

Book Fort, 2006-2007

One of the few large-scale sculptures of Snow’s career, Book Fort is emblematic of the artist’s counter-cultural bent. The piece evokes a recluse’s fort or hideout, its walls constructed with books that proffer the fringe philosophies and dark histories Snow found relevant and radical. The sculpture pairs solitude with engagement in a way that has become increasingly rare due to the rise of the digital age (vehemently eschewed by Snow) and social media in particular, where every doctrine is shared and collectively reinforced. Book Fort also helped usher in Snow’s prolific period of collage work; it was in making this sculpture that he became enamored of book covers and end pages as art materials.

Secret Conception, 2007

Snow regularly used bell jars as containers for arrangements of objects, riffing upon both the jars’ scientific purpose as tools to create airless vacuums and their Victorian-era popularity as a means for keeping dust off of peculiar keepsakes such as taxidermy. The title, Secret Conception, alludes to Snow’s daughter, Secret Snow, making overt the age-old connections between the seeds of artistic and human creation.

Collage

Snow took an early interest in fanzine culture, beginning to make his own in the early 2000s. Collage works were a natural outgrowth from these self-published zine editions, and he began focusing on the collages in earnest around the time of his first solo show, Moments Like this Never Last, at Rivington Arms gallery in New York in 2005. Snow made the monumental ejaculate-on-newsprint collage on view here, Fuck the Police, that same year. Snow’s collages progressed from simple interventions to more complex word and image play, but, at all stages, his process involved surrounding himself with a mass of extracted pieces from obsessively collected book and print media sources. Snow kept an especially extensive archive of the New York Daily News and the New York Post, whose salacious headlines lent themselves to his argument against the wanton hyperboles of the press. He would slowly settle these collected fragments into place on a wide variety of supports: copy paper, vintage end papers, leather book jackets, pieces of wood, and found frames among them. The collages take many forms: ransom notes, poetic and resonant offerings from a conspiracy theorist, or flowing shapes merged from disparate contexts that recall Surrealist exquisite corpse drawing. As with his Dadaist forbears, Snow’s suspicion of power manifests itself in visual deconstructions of power’s supporting logic. Often both delicate and aggressive, the collage works are a prime example of Snow’s interest in the way humor, beauty, and the utterly abject mingle freely off the beaten path.

Polaroids (2000-2009)

Snow began shooting the Polaroids in large quantities at roughly the time of 9/11, when he was twenty years old. These photographs offer a time capsule of the years following (and of a coming-of-age), giving us a larger picture of the wiliness and abandon that propelled the artist and his circle after the attacks. The Polaroids also present Snow as a street photographer who was as taken with total strangers as he was with close friends and family. He valued the medium for its physicality: a durable record one could carry around the city, scratch on with a ballpoint pen, singe with a lighter, or glue into a zine or collage. The smallness of the object also lends itself to an immediate and intimate interaction, perfectly suited for Snow’s mission to do away with any tainting properties from outside interests.

Penis Envy, 2007

2007 was Snow’s most prolific year. Between a spring solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin and a fall solo show (his last) at Peres Projects in Los Angeles, Snow produced over 250 collages, forty photographic works, and a dozen sculptures. That summer, Snow and artist Dan Colen created the iconic Nest exhibition at Deitch Projects in New York, a large-scale installation and performance piece. The exhibition at Peres Projects, however, would be the first and only time Snow staged a live performative artwork of his own. It was the remnant elements of this performance that were used to create his largest solo installation work, Penis Envy. The germ for the work was a pull-quote from Ariel Levy’s January 2007 profile of Snow, Colen, and Ryan McGinley in New York magazine: “How much talent does it really take to come on the New York Post, anyway?” Following two solo exhibitions at Rivington Arms gallery in downtown Manhattan, as well as his inclusion in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the artist had become known for his prodigious use of ejaculate; over the course of seven months, he dispatched this technique on an enlarged photocopy of the Levy quotation. That work was placed in the storefront window of Peres Projects and was also the source for a poster stack on the floor of the gallery (visitors were encouraged to take one home for free). He also made a second enlargement—this one spanning twelve feet and placed in a light box—which was the centerpiece of the performance inside Peres Projects. In preparation for this performance, Snow placed an ad for men to come to the gallery and decorate the light box with semen. Those who responded included performers, sex workers, and men from the street—all were paid for their participation. Snow directed and filmed the proceedings with a Super 8 camera, stringing that footage together to create a projection that shot through a hole in the gallery floor onto its ceiling. The installation here is a faithful restaging of the 2007 piece, including a C-print and Snow’s largest single collage, which were hung among the Penis Envy elements.

FAMILAE ERASE, 2008

Familae Erase, made in Snow’s Bowery studio, is one of the artist’s most challenging works. As in much of Snow’s artistic output, no attempt is made in the film to conceal his struggle with addiction or his often-anguished relationships, with himself and with the world around him. Moving deeper into the composition of the film, one discerns a master coda to the entirety of Snow’s artistic output. As with Sisyphus, Sissy Fuss, Silly Puss (2009), Familae Erase was edited entirely “in-camera,” meaning only with the stops and starts of the recording process (without any post-production). This approach underscores the prioritization of immediacy across all of Snow’s chosen media. Snow insisted that art must be formed in the moment, hindsight—or for that matter overt “technique”—would only cheat or dilute the experience for the viewer. Yet in Familae Erase, more explicitly than anywhere else in Snow’s work, the curtain is pulled back a little, and we observe his idiosyncratic poetic process: the homemade effects with blood, glitter, and light; the collage materials, books, and pornography he swirls around himself and begins to juxtapose; the ritual and cumulative actions of making the sculptures from whatever materials are on hand. We see him enact a kind of Gothic irrationality and melodrama, performed within his belfry of a studio space with the occasional emergence of natural light through a window frame. These strategies deliberately confuse interior and exterior space.