Michael Snow

“Michael Snow: Photo-Centric” posits a decentralized notion of photography at the center of the Canadian artist’s oeuvre. Positioned on floors, mounted on walls, and hanging in installations, the photographs—which were shot between 1962 and 2003—reveal humor, narrative, and performance as correlates to Snow’s more widely exhibited exercises as a structuralist filmmaker. The exhibition reveals that some of Snow’s most structurally reflexive works are also his most ludic. For instance, the grid of sixteen photographs in Press, 1969, pictures various objects literally leveled by the flattening gaze of the camera. Whether a pair of pressed gloves or a squashed stick of butter, each image is sandwiched beneath a redundant layer of Plexiglas bolted with C-clamps. Structure thus gives way to humor as Minimalism cedes to excess.

In fact, Snow’s photographs are frequently narrative in ways that his most iconic films (such as Wavelength, 1967, or La Région Centrale, 1971) are not. In Media Res, 1998, is a large-scale, lushly colored photograph taken from a bird’s-eye view. The scene captures three people reacting to the escape of a caged parrot. Like the Oriental rug on which the action unfolds, the photograph is displayed on the floor, the bird’s plumage a brilliant smear at its center. While motion here is the clear subject, movement in this show as a whole is most dynamic in the contortions Snow impels in the spectator. Imposition, 1976, and Crouch, Leap, Land, 1970, coax viewers to assume positions similar to those performed by the models in the photographs. The tilt of the head required to study Imposition (a photograph hung on its side) leaves us mimicking the poses of two models who in turn contemplate a photograph, while in Crouch, we must kneel to observe the images of a crouching, leaping, and landing woman affixed to the bottom of three hanging stations. Our recourse to Snow’s photography is never direct but rather directed: We double take, calculate, rotate, and circulate to Snow’s specifications.