Two parts nostalgia and one part hope is Dan Colen’s exhibition Help! at the blissful Brant Foundation. The show is a journey beginning at the end with two massive half buried box trucks dominating the lawn’s expanse. Within the foundation is the overlying theme of life and death and everything in between. The focus of the show is spun from the artist’s dear friend Dash Snow’s death from an overdose in 2009. What results is an array of emotions wrapped in different mediums. On the ground floor is the remembrance, a video of Snow and Colen on a bender, early chewing gum paintings, a curtain of rose encased crack pipes, and a heap of fences, wires and junk that creates an enormous bird sanctuary with songbirds. Upstairs are the newer works, a sense of overcoming, celebratory confetti, trash and smashed flower paintings delight in the light filled atrium. I chose this willowy trapeze dress splashed with a custom print by Tanya Taylor, whose clothes are injected with something fun, mysterious and fleeting much like this exhibition.
Tanya Taylor dress, Topshop sandals
The Brant Foundation, Dan Colen, Help!
Hair by Cosma De Marinis, Photographs by Tylor Hou