His Mt. Fuji

Abstract

Snow: Projected Works by Michael Power Plant Toronto December 11, 2009-March 7, 2010 Opening on his eighty-first birthday and comprising seven installations produced throughout the past decade, Recent Snow: Projected Works by Michael Snow was proof that remains as vital as ever. was first lauded in the late 1960s, when his uber-experimental film Wavelength (1966) was heralded as the quintessence of alternative cinema. continual critical adulation of Wavelength, however, tends to obscure Snow's prolific, career. In addition to making films and videos, has also sculpted, painted, photographed, and composed music throughout, the last forty years. Here, he skillfully merged a number of these passions with the medium he is best known for manipulating: projected light. Accordingly, the first installation in the exhibit was Piano Sculpture (2009), in which foregrounded a powerful aesthetic component that many artists overlook altogether--sound. On each of four walls, projected an image of his own hands playing an original score on a grand piano, while over the strings, he placed an actual speaker, tints visually and aurally amplifying the soaring glissandos he played. While this sculptural pun clearly acknowledged Snow's debt to such predecessors as John Cage and Nam June Paik, it also wittily underscored technology's ability to make this solo musician into a quartet. Elsewhere, he demonstrated his playfulness by subverting normative viewing paradigms. Serve, Deserve (2009), states, was specifically designed for an ambulatory audience [who] ... might arrive or leave at any time,(1) and as such, is engaging at any given moment. From overhead, projected, or rather serves a restaurant meal of salad and spaghetti onto a square, waist-high pedestal. ever-changing (and charming) tabletop alludes to the collaged cafe tables of Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, as well as to early cinema, with wildly undulating noodles recalling Charlie Chaplin's twirling shoestring spaghetti. paid more formal homage to these modernist pioneers in The Corner of Braque and Picasso Streets (2009), where he utilized matte white plinths--typically used to exhibit and exalt the art object--to construct a three-dimensional architectural form. Against this Louise Nevelson-like sculpture, he projected a real-time video of activities occurring just outside the gallery's walls. As Snow's didactics stated, [Here] the planar surface is removed from our perception. It is amazing (but so common as to be unremarked-upon) how convincing spatial and motion depiction then becomes. resultant object--a perpetually moving cityscape was a four-dimensional nod to those same Cubists, who were wholly enraptured by cinema's ability to represent reality more convincingly than paint on canvas ever could. …