A shrewd manipulator of skin and surface, Dean Snyder draws us along the edges of a scatological, yet organic beauty: tumescent orchids hanging on fragile vines, drooping leaves, impotent cigarette butts, almost recognizable organs swallowed up in circuitry and webs. Snyder creates a florescent world, lush and toxic, channeling us toward an uncanny ecology. In Erebos (2008), a black tree stump floats above an open cardboard box as if just released, a patched inner tube hanging off one of its broken limbs, tendrils of smoke from a burning cigarette becoming thorny vines. Bandaged with hinges and tubes running into and out of its truncated limbs, this unwieldy hybrid improvises in shape as much as sound. Darkly humorous, the cut and layered drawing conjures a magician’s box, now empty and open, alluding to, without revealing, many of the obscured sources from which the work feeds.…see the entire article in the print version of November’s Sculpture magazine.
