Michael Snow

Born in 1929 in Toronto (CA). Lives and works in Toronto (CA).

  

Solar breath, (Northern Caryatids)(Souffle solaire, (Cariatides du nord))

2002
Color video
duration: 62'
Purchased in: 2007

Renowned photographer, film maker, musician, and visual artist, Michael Snow frames and captures, among other choice subjects, movements of air and light. Solar breath (Northern Caryatids) presents an anti-spectacle of the breath of wind which has just swelled the folds of a curtain, animating it with majestic respiration. As the artist explains, in the early 1970s he built a log cabin 30 feet wide by 30 feet long on the Canadian coast. During his frequent visits, he observed that the “solar breath” produced, to say the least, a mysterious wind “performance”: “an hour before sunset, a white cotton curtain hanging over an open window billows, furrows, flutters, and clings to the nearly invisible surface of the insect screen, before becoming inert. When the curtain unfolds, it reveals the landscape outside, with trees and a pile of fire wood.” The plasticity of movements, the intensity of their amplitude, and the frequency with which they refresh their ephemeral imprint are the essence of this masterful natural “spectacle.” This mutable concert follows a conductor’s hand no more than the wind obeys man’s command.
The title of the film evokes caryatids, or ancient sculptures of female figures robed in long tunics and supporting an entablature on their heads, which are often used in architecture as columns. A poetic transposition of the folds of an ancient tunic windblown by the “solar breath,” Snow’s work reflects on the basic elements of cinema: time, space, and light. Unlike the spectacular effects commonly used in the film industry, Snow’s work focuses our attention on the powerful beauty inherent in the world: sunlight with its rich array of nuances, the choreographic movement of the wind, and changing time of day are the only ingredients of a contemplative work of art. It celebrates early cinema by the use of (solar) light image and the screen shot corresponding to the two-dimensional space furnished by the insect screen.

In cinema, Snow researches duration and contemplation of fixed space (“Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot”, 1974), and likes to allude to his earlier work in order to contextualize personal interest in natural and “non-spectacular” gestures. One could cite, among others, Sink (1969) which consists of eighty slides of the sink in the artist’s workshop, stained by splashes of paint, and in which each shot is taken in a differently colored light; his experiments with pliage made between 1959 and 1967, using canvas or paper, without decoupage or collage; and, finally, Speed of Light (1983), a photographic work representing a transparent curtain over a lit window of his log cabin, which brought to the fore the pictorial aspect of light at sunset and of shadows coloring the screen.

Following the oxymoron that “less is more,” Snow focuses his work on the motif of the “open window” as envisioned by the fifteenth-century Italian theorist, architect and painter Leon Battista Alberti: a framed opening upon the world providing a view of a delimited space in order to capture its essence. Thus Michael Snow’s art helps situate our gaze in the world in the most alert manner so as to create heightened sensory acuteness and articulate a libertarian resistance to cultural shackles.

^{Cécilia Bezzan}

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