Love Roses

“Loves roses” are glass tubes, 3/8 inches in diameter, 4 inches long. Covered on one end with foil, each contains a cloth flower: red, yellow, blue, violet, white or green. They are duplicitous objects. If you ask one kind of person, they’ll tell you these “stems” are romantic offerings, valentine’s gifts. If you ask another kind of person, they’ll tell you these are pipes for smoking crack cocaine. In September 2008 at a palazzo gallery in Brescia, Italy, Dan Colen and Nate Lowman installed the third incarnation of an evolving body of collaborative work. A long-envisioned but, until Italy, unrealized plan for a sculpture had been a “beaded” curtain made of “love roses” (and titled the same). The curtain was hung in a doorway leading into the ornate spaces housing the rest of their show. Dash snow arrived in Brescia when Colen and Lowman were finishing their installation. A close friend of the collaborators, snow had documented their shared process since its i