Arts & Entertainment

Max Snow's Latest Show Opens in Springs

"Please Please Please" on view through July 15.

Max Snow’s newest show “Please Please Please” opened at the Fireplace Project in Springs this Saturday. 

Snow, a seasonal resident of East Hampton since childhood, is mostly known for his black and white photography — ranging from portraits, like 2012’s “100 Headless Women”, to still shots of burning wooden structures, like stars, words and coffins that Snow builds himself. 

Though Snow’s last show, this January’s “The Lady of Shallot” at the Colette Gallery in Paris, featured his high-contrast, nearly burned out white background style of portraiture, he has become more widely known in recent months for his more sculptural work after some of his burning objects were featured in a recent 30 Seconds to Mars music video for the song, “Up in the Air”.

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“Please Please Please” can in some ways be seen as a continuation of this more physical vein in Snow’s work — as almost all the pieces at the Fireplace Project, located at 851 Springs Fireplace Road, draw from a sense of re-appropriation, bricolage and defacement. 

The smallest pieces featured are an untitled series of found landscape photographs overlaid with Xeroxed-newsprint illustrations, resulting in what feels like an almost cartoonish pastiche of a 1950s pulp horror or sci-fi novel cover. Another series of three gelatin silver print photographs, all of classic fetish pin-up shoots, feature words and phrases painted onto the glass. Though perhaps the bound woman whose text becomes the title of the show, “Please Please Please” is the most arresting, due to its placement in full view of the front door, the diptych featuring the front and back view of a blond woman with bound hands and the words “Nobody’s Darlin’ But Mine” had many admirers during Saturday’s opening. The most shocking of Snow's latest works, however, are the bones.

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Asked where exactly he had come across the multiple human and animal parts, Snow joked that he liked to pick them up wherever he went. 

There are two almost complete skulls featured in  “Please Please Please," both with some silver or gold teeth. One wears a long blond wig and has two 19th century twenty dollar gold pieces where its eyes should be; the other is unadorned except for the word, “murder” painted across its forehead.

At the center of the show’s main display case, is the pelvis of a child or adolescent, used as the support for a crystal ball — in which one can see the image of a snarling wolf.

Though “Please Please Please” will be on display through July 15, it is hardly Snow’s only work on the East End this season. 

Apart from the Fireplace Project, Snow has also been made the artist-in-residence at Montauk’s Surf Lodge. As well as curating a series of shows there this summer, and outfitting every room with a sample of his own work, Snow has also engaged in his first foray into fashion design. 

This season, the Surf Lodge gift shop will be selling T-shirts, tote bags, and other wearable works all designed by Snow in homage to the classic Harley Davidson style. 

Snow’s video art debut is set to appear first on the acclaimed website Nowness to mark the July 4 holiday, and afterwards will be played on the Surf Lodge’s main screen.


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