Dash Snow

Dash Snow’s Untitled (Thong) reworks imagery of porn, violence, and glamour into a totem of faded power. Recalling the optimistic ideology of Suprematist design, Snow’s collage presents a futuristic icon from degenerate emblems. Mounted on a mundane wall paper background, photocopied snippets of syringes, gems, rodents, machine parts and bottoms merge as an abstracted cyborg figure, an unsavoury goddess of underclass bravura. Adopting all the attitude of hip hop posturing, Dash Snow’s Fuck the Police presents a prized collection of newspaper headlines emblazoned with instances cop corruption. Each salacious story is splattered with cum and framed and mounted as a trophy. Wittily combining protest with hard-core bravado, Snow’s installation draws upon fictional connotations to conjure sociopathic images of gangsta persona. In his ballsy statement of counter-culture vehemence, Snow merges Warhol reference with Tarantino sensationalism in humorously pathological display. Dash Snow’s Untitled presents a double tragedy with frank candour. In the image on the left, Snow photographs a newspaper clipping of Pat Tillman, an American professional footballer who famously gave up his career at the top of his game to serve his country in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he was sadly killed by friendly fire. Juxtaposed against another media image of an Islamic father rushing through war torn territory clutching his terrified daughter, Snow offers a diptych as protest, highlighting the consequences of conflict and its impossible morality. In This Was Your Life, Dash Snow uses the sensational story of cannibal and self-style messiah Daniel Rakowitz as an inspiration for his installation. Drug den accoutrements of cheap leather sofa, potted plant, satanic medallion, and snake skin boots are compiled in shrine-like effigy, rendering a portrait of a monster as a sad, pathetic, ridiculous cliché. Piled in the well-worn seat of pot-head immobility, these relics of evil are transformed to impotent and empty mementos. Accompanied by a newspaper clipping detailing bizarre court revelations, Snow’s installation examines the fine line between banality, insanity, and sheer terror. Dash Snow’s Untitled (Thong) reworks imagery of porn, violence, and glamour into a totem of faded power. Recalling the optimistic ideology of Suprematist design, Snow’s collage presents a futuristic icon from degenerate emblems. Mounted on a mundane wall paper background, photocopied snippets of syringes, gems, rodents, machine parts and bottoms merge as an abstracted cyborg figure, an unsavoury goddess of underclass bravura. Dash Snow originally started taking photos when he was a yobbish teenager. Using his Polaroids as a diaristic record of the many ‘nights before’ he couldn’t remember, his snapshots piece together a fragmented portrait of peripheral existence. Filling in the voids of his blackouts, Snow’s photos broach the seedy and taboo with a dislocated intimacy. Suggesting a subplot of double-identity, Snow’s camera operates as a tool of psychological intervention. Creating a ‘memory bank’ through a lens, he becomes an observer of his own life, forging the personal as dissociative media experience. Working in similar genre to Nan Goldin and Richard Billingham, Snow’s images are uncomfortable in their subject matter. Instances of sex, drugs, violence, and poverty are documented with disarming frankness and honesty. Offering a unique insight into an alternative lifestyle, Snow uncovers a poetic beauty within the dissolute and discarded. For Dash Snow photography becomes a way of engaging with environment and memory. Each snapshot captures a place, time, and emotion, freeze-framing the individual components of everyday experience, mapping out the compilation of an identity. Using a Polaroid camera for its instantaneous results and association as keep-sakes, the familiar format of Snow’s photos replicates the sentiments of his images: cheap, disposable, and plebian mementos become humble evidence of discarded beauty.

Documenting his life through a lens, Snow’s photographs explore personal existence as a periphery to globalised culture. Presenting an unabridged account of his marginalised lifestyle, Snow’s often uncomfortable images paint an intimate portrait where topical issues such as sex, drugs, poverty, and anti-social behaviour are confronted from a frank position of personal participation. Translated through the generic quality of his medium, Snow’s photos convey the disoriented fragments of memory as voyeuristic observation, conceiving the experience of ‘self’ as a bi-product of mass media dissociation.

Picturing the underbelly of contemporary culture, Snow distances his images with cinematic veritas. Graffiti, ironically broken signage, seedy hotel sex romps, and instances of human despair don’t evoke empathy, but rather suggest a poetic affirmation of humanity and against-the-odds survivalism. In Dash Snow’s Untitled, three photographs are arranged in vertical succession, creating a loose narrative in their film strip composition. Intentionally ambiguous, his blurred and cropped images simulate intoxicated perception, encapsulating seedy late night ambience with fragmented distortion. Shot from an obscure floor-level angle, Snow places the viewer in the position of the paralytic; his obscure glimpses of pub life transform the benign into hallucinatory visions of the bizarre and grotesque.