Curated by James King
Having established a reputation with his series “Walking Woman” (1961–67) before effectively birthing structuralist film with 1967’s Wavelength (described by Manny Farber in these pages as “probably the most rigorously composed movie in existence”), Michael Snow has produced a large and diverse body of work that still casts a long shadow. Devoted to the lesser-known first fifteen years of the artist’s visual practice (he was originally a professional jazz musician), this exhibition surveys the ninety-one-year-old Canadian’s output during his formative years in Toronto, before he left for New York in 1962. Featuring forty-plus paintings, sculptures, films, videos, works on paper, and hybrid “foldages,” the show highlights the abstract experiments and figurative studies that underpin his later, more conceptual explorations of perception, representation, and the various technologies and languages through which they operate. An accompanying fully illustrated catalogue sports a preface by Snow and an essay by the curator, a professor at McMaster University.
