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“Love Roses” are glass tubes about four inches long, each containing a colored cloth flower. Ambiguous objects by nature, they can be seen either as romantic Valentine’s gifts or as pipes for smoking crack cocaine. In September 2008, at Apalazzo Gallery in Brescia, Italy, Dan Colen and Nate Lowman realized the third version of an ongoing collaboration, installing a curtain made of Love Roses at the entrance to their exhibition. Artist and photographer Dash Snow, a close friend of the duo, arrived as they were finishing the setup and documented the process. During the opening, he photographed the mostly female visitors passing through the curtain, turning the installation into a performative space that blurred the boundaries between art-making and art consumption. Colen and Lowman occasionally appeared in the shots, while Snow himself became part of the work as both observer and participant. The three artists had planned to publish a book of these photographs after seeing the developed film in 2008, but the project was never realized due to Snow’s death. The book has now been completed as a collaboration between the Dash Snow Estate, Dan Colen, Nate Lowman, and Brendan Dugan
