( Dash tagging the Brooklyn Bridge, in 2007)
New York City and the art world lost one their brightest young stars Monday night, yet again to a drug overdose. I caught a few of Dash Snow's photos at the Whitney Biennial, and knew his family (to whom he was estranged) and younger brother when I was in grade school. It got me thinking about how many artists we've lost senselessly young and well before their prime (Elliot Smith and Jeremy Blake immediately spring to mind).
I'm often asked whose artwork plasters the background of this blog and I guess now would be as good a time as any to discuss it. The digital painting is by Jeremy Blake (another New York City-based artist), whose work was often described as "Color Field set in motion" (NYT, Jeremy Blake, 35, Artist Who Used Lush-Toned Video, Dies, Randy Kennedy, August 1, 2007). I first saw an installation of his exhibited at a Biennial (not the same year as Dash's - 2004, I think), but started seriously following him after Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Punch Drunk Love', where he contributed to the various abstract hallucination sequences.
In 2007, after the apparent suicide of his long-time girlfriend, Blake walked naked into the Rockaways' surf. A fisherman found his body five days later, his clothes and wallet left behind on the beach. Frustratingly, there wasn't much left by Blake - the only book I could find, and I think perhaps the only one that exists, is for Winchester, a video series he completed in 2005, which shifted into a more narrative-based realm and focused on San Jose's famed Winchester Mystery House.
(a still from Blake's Winchester series)You can read about Blake's unfinished work, 'Glitterbeast', in the New York Times article linked below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/arts/design/29blak.html
No comments:
Post a Comment