Michael Snow at Jack Shainman

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney

The title of this exhibition, "Powers of Two," by veteran Canadian artist and filmmaker Michael Snow, points to the play with doubling, reflections and reversals found in his work. Here he created a meditation on the dualities inherent in acts of viewing and perception.

Snow often makes his point with humor. In the video Couple (2001), a study for his 2002 full-length feature Corpus Callosum, a man and woman are viewed from the back as they approach a too-small door. Their figures are digitally stretched and distorted until they are reshaped into a block that passes neatly through. After a few moments of inactivity, this human block reappears, front first, and awkwardly teeters back through the door and out of the frame. This playful work sets up themes that appear elsewhere, among them the manipulability of the technology of representation.

The title piece, Powers of Two (2003), a large (8 1/2 by 16 feet), four-panel photographic transparency of another couple in bed, evidently enjoying an afternoon tryst, was suspended in the middle of the gallery. The naked woman's gaze challenges the viewer much in the manner of Manet's Olympia, while the man turns away from us. An opening in the wall behind the bed that appears at first to be a window with a view of the sky turns out to be a mirror reflecting a window on the opposite side of the room, outside the frame. Since this window is located in what would be our space, we almost expect to find our own reflection in the mirror. Another strange detail in the image is revealed through a close examination of the book spines on a shelf in the room, among which a single title is reversed. When we walk to the other side of the transparency, where the woman still stares at us from the image, which is entirely flipped, we discover that all the book titles are reversed except for this one.

With its references to the enigmatic mirror play in Manet's The Bar at the Folies-Bergere and Velazquez's Las Meninas, as well as its disruption of our expectation that the back of the transparency will reveal the back of the scene, this work reminds us of the unreliability of illusion and the shifting nature of the viewer's relationship to the image.

Other works raise equally interesting problems and paradoxes. Paris de Jugement le and/or State of the Arts (2003) is a photo of three "real" naked women with their backs to us gazing at the painted nudes in a blowup of Cezanne's Large Bathers. A double-sided photograph titled Engraving Jim Male Heir (2003) shows a full-size standing naked man whose back and front are superimposed over one another on both sides.

The show also included a new artist's book, Biographie: of the Walking Woman/de la femme qui marche, 1961-1967 (2004), which presents photo documentation, in the form of a quasi-narrative, of a simplified female silhouette that Snow painted, drew and interposed as a cutout or shadow in a variety of urban environments and in indoor settings in the '60s.

Retrospective, too, were the larger works in the show, relating back to Snow's early explorations in film and video that opened up avenues for an examination of the mechanisms of art. He has here revisited his esthetic concerns with wit and intelligence.