Happy Accidents, Happy Endings, 2010

“I like how these materials take some control away from me, allowing for a more uncertain future and yet a more finished piece.” DANCOLEN

The work Happy Accidents Happy Endings by New York-based artist Dan Colen was executed with used chewing gum in 2010. It demonstrates how clearly, even palpably so, how Colen has learned to work with lowly matter and materials by investigating their individual histories and exposing their latent energy through the process of painting. In doing so, he addresses the gestural approach of the Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, undermining their formalism by the application of used chewing gum to the blank canvas, and so reconceptualising the process of painting. Colen thus pursues postmodern strategies by drawing for his material and subject from urban sub-culture, the mass media, personal experience and a mixture of highbrow and lowbrow. In 2006, Dan Colen took a picture of the Bubble Gum alley in Los Angeles, known for its accumulation of used bubble gum on the walls. Titled In love with Life, the photograph marks the beginning of Colen’s interest in using chewing gum as a medium of expression.