Michael Snow: A Life Survey (1955-2020) is now on view at Jack Shainman Gallery. In a career that defied categorization in medium or genre, Snow’s work embodied originality over novelty, the cerebral over the conceptual, and evolution over conclusion. It is with this expansive vision that A Life Survey is mounted, offering an intricate and dynamic portrait of Snow’s life and work.
Born in Toronto in 1928, Snow showed an early affinity for creative experimentation. Throughout his youth, he played piano in local jazz bands and received prizes for his early paintings. This led him to the Ontario College of Art where he studied from 1948 to 1952. When declaring his major from rigidly divided academic departments, he chose Design, comprehending that it was the “common aspect of all disciplines.” Fascinated by pushing the limits on ways of seeing, Snow was influenced most by Modern artists who made work on their own terms, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp, Willem De Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Yves Klein, and Mark Rothko. In these early years, he described embarking on a “try this, try that” period through which experiences from his professional career, daily life, and jazz improvisations inspired pieces like A to Z, 1956, Drawn Out, 1959, and The Drum Book, 1960.
For the 1967 exhibition catalogue Statements/18 Canadian Artists, Snow explained, “I am not a professional. My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor…sometimes they all work together. Also many of my paintings have been done by a painter, sculpture by a sculptor, films by a filmmaker, music by a musician.” In this way, Snow’s medium was medium; whether communicating through drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, holography, animation, film, sound, or performance, his art was a means of getting closer to an idea by way of iteration, variation, and duration. The aesthetic parameters for his art concerned three essential gestures of creating: additive, subtractive, and molding.
No body of work exemplifies Snow’s process more than Walking Woman. The series began when Snow cut out a five-foot silhouette from a piece of cardboard. Born from Snow’s imagination, the cut-out outlined a woman in forward motion whose head, arms, and legs were contained by the rectangular edges of the cardboard. From this image, Snow made Four to Five, 1962, a photographic series staging the stencil in real cityscapes; Shot!, 1963, a composition of small papers stamped with the Walking Woman; and Little Walk, 1964, a live-action film and wide ranging sampling of Walking Woman works in his studio, projected on a life-size free-standing Walking Woman cutout. His prerogative was not a conceptual conclusion, but a desire to comprehend the multifaceted meaning of an image when translated through an expansive spectrum of materials.
Departing from his work in “absolute surfaces,” Snow found himself fascinated by the moving image, a medium that echoed his attempts to capture temporality, memory, illusion, and subjectivity—expanding his physical pursuit of iteration to twenty-four frames per second. Though he is best known for his 1967 film Wavelength—establishing him in the ranks of visionaries like Jonas Mekas—works like Back and Forth, 1968-69, and Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, 1974, exemplify his unique use of film to create a simulacrum. He would construct a world, invent conditions, distort perspective, then rattle it—physically and conceptually—until an art object was revealed. Works like the performance Mirrored, 1967/1994, the book Cover to Cover, 1975, and the color photograph Flash! 20:49, 15/6/2001, 2001, prove that while specific mediums, such as film, catalyzed Snow’s introspective endeavors, his variation on a theme could not be pigeonholed.
Michael Snow’s rebellion against traditional genres in artmaking can now be appreciated as a singular aesthetic philosophy of the interconnectedness between all creative mediums—posing diversity of vision as the essential tool for discovery. This exhibition celebrates a panoramic survey of a kaleidoscopic artist who deserves a comprehensive revisitation.
Jack Shainman Gallery: The School | 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY
Now On View Through December 16, 2023
