DAN REGAN "DON'T DELAY, DECAY" | 5 - 9 April 2017 | Via Vivaio 22, Milan | Press day Thursday 6 April

For Milan’s Design Week (April 2017, 4-9) Carola Cometto presents Don’t delay decay, a solo show by artist Dan Regan (1986, Venice, CA). Set up in a decadent 18th century apartment located in Via Vivaio 22, the exhibition recounts the origin of Dan's relatable and human style, deeply rooted in street-culture. The show will include photographs and installations. In addition, Italian design firm HOMMM creates an outdoor installation inspired to Venice aesthetics, showing their Smooth Collection.

Dan grew up in Venice in the early 90 's, when Westside Los Angeles urban beach wasn’t yet the hype-cool neighborhood that it is now. The famous Venice Beach Boardwalk and its boulevards, were once known for their high crime rate. Venice was deemed as the ghetto by the sea for its gang related incidents, drug traffic and poverty. Its streets now filled with stretches of high-end retail stores and restaurants, creating unaffordable housing prices and becoming a highly desirable place for families to move to, has caused the very people that built Venice to be pushed out.

Dan's personal archive represents his most authentic and intimate work, an emotional-visual diary: «I was able to recover some of my hard drives with photos from my late teenage years: pre-social media, pre-camera phones. The stuff I found was raw as fuck. It was real. It lived for no purpose just other than to document my surroundings” and “the camera kind of turned me into an anthropologist. I started to photograph my neighborhood: the mom and pop stores, the old cars, the craftsmen homes, and the local people that still remain in Venice. Back then it was all for survival and pride, not for likes». Dan recalls how «most of us didn’t fully understand that our beach city culture was such an influence on the world and that how heavily that had been initiated by those before us. We were just being ourselves, when in actuality our town helped define many corners of culture across so many mediums: the way we dressed, the cars we drove, the music we listened to, the graffiti the dogs we owned, the way we spoke, rode a skateboard or paddled into a wave».

From Dan’s film-based photography, showed here for the first time, stems his "No School" message inspired by his personal journey: Dan is a self-taught artist/photographer/filmmaker/illustrator, a role model for young people showing that chances are out there.

Ultimately, with Don't Delay Decay Dan documents a whole generation, cherishes his friends and family and shows his hope for the future. The show celebrates not only his success as an artist, but as a thoughtful human being.

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