July 17, 2009
FRERK and MARC C. WOEHR
Carmichael Gallery is pleased to present new artwork by Frerk and Marc C. Woehr, the feature at´rtists in their July Showcase. The German duo combines urband graphics and whimsical figures to create exciting mixed media work on canvas an wodd. This first time both artists have exhibited their work in Los Angeles.
Exhibition Dates: July 9 – July 30 2009, opening hours: 1pm - 7pm
CARMICHAEL GALLERY
257 N. La Brea Ave - West Hollywood, CA 90038
www.carmichaelgallery.com
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July 16, 2009
R.I.P. DASH SNOW
Those words have been sent in by CFA Gallery today…
On Dash
On meeting Dash for the first time, you don’t get the impression that he is from our time. Dash, born in 1981, does not seem like a man of the year 2007. With his long hair, his hippie sunglasses and his clothes, his preference for the music of the late 1960s and the whole psychedelic sound, Dash seems someone who was catapulted from the 1960s into our time. And that is of course no coincidence, but rather a conscious revenge against an idiotic time. Or, to be more precise, against two idiotic decades. Dash Snow is a child of the eighties, and they were, despite all the Miami Vice like pastel craziness, at their core a dark and melancholy decade. It was the decade of Reagonomics and Thatcherism, the decade of the insane arms race, people had no social utopias anymore, but instead they were afraid: afraid of losing their work, afraid of the new Batemans who would mercilessly rationalise them away, afraid of nuclear war and forest dieback, and then, in the mid-eighties, the fear of AIDS came on top of it all. Work, love, life: everything was under existential threat. That was the time into which Dash was born; the year he turned twenty was 2001, which was the beginning of a new era of fear and hysteria – the so-called millennium years will be remembered as a decade characterised by the war against terror, fear of Islamism, and a general sense of exhaustion. In the cities, architecture summoned up the good old days; new forms hardly developed. It is clear that you ask yourself in such a time where and how to go on, what to take as your own starting point and it is not surprising – and indeed rather likable – that Dash Snow simply decided to leave his own time temporarily to delve, like an archaeologist, into the depths of the 1960s and 1920s to explore how an era works that believes in experimentation, in the future, and in itself. Dash frequently works with old, yellowed paper that he tears from old books or finds somewhere. On this paper, he glues collages of words and images – and the results look as if the beat poets had collaborated with Max Ernst. Wild physical desires encounter phrases from the press, cut-out word fragments run like worried policemen of meaning across naked bodies. Of course that’s not always original, but it is necessary. By turning himself into Kerouac and Max Ernst, by assuming their role and their aesthetics, he seeks the mechanics of an optimistic awakening, the wild, buoyant, highly energetic anarchy that characterised the eras of Ernst and Kerouac and that is so sadly missing today. Perhaps we get closest to Dash’s method by using the rich German term Verdichtung. Verdichten means on the one hand to condense, to shorten, clarify; on the other hand it means to kidnap objects from the everyday world of prose into the realm of poetry – and poetry is, according to the original Greek meaning of the word poeisis, nothing other than the ‘art of bringing forth’. What is here being brought forth and clarified in Dash’s poetical collages? Dash condenses words and images of our time, the newspaper headlines, the pictures of naked women and of the great criminals into Dadaist formulas which suddenly, almost violently, sum up all the promises and crimes of our day. The word collages are also Verdichtung: they disassemble the headlines into single components and squeeze them together into nonsense messages, – thus bringing hidden truths and desires to light. They are pictures that counter the large political ideologies, the Iraq War, the West’s promises of happiness, wealth, sex, and power, with images of an individual Gegenglueck that cannot be grasped with the images and collective promises of salvation made by politics and advertising. This counter-happiness can also be found in the finesse of the materials – when he glues a word onto a piece of wood, thus underlaying and charging themeaning of the abstract term through the direct sensuousness of the grained material. There are many melancholy gestures in Dash’s works, yellowed paper, a black-and-white aesthetic, as well as vanitas motifs, skulls, death symbols. But Dash does not surrender to this melancholy, he does not celebrate it, he counters it with emanations of a wild vibrancy and of absolute happiness in the here and now: images of kissing nudes, traces of sperm, pictures of wild excess, and this antidote is also an outcry against the time that allowed itself to be completely lulled and now lies exhausted on the ground. How could the energy and verve of Dada, surrealism, and the beat generation, how could the optimistic energy of the twenties and sixties be translated into our time? That is the question that comes to mind when encountering Dash’s work, be it his collages or the Polaroids he made of himself and his friends, an atlas of the great odyssey to adulthood. And the fact that Dash, the archaeologist of happiness and hero of the immediate moment does not always answer these questions doesn’t matter all that much. He’s only 26; he still has time to find answers.
Anna T. Berger, Summer 2007
READ IN GERMAN AFTER THE JUMP.