Reading between the lines of Snow’s multimedia
Canadian pioneer’s wordplay reveals hidden meanings
Anew exhibition at Galerie de l’UQÀM offers an opportunity to sample the life’s work of a giant of the art world, Canada’s own Michael Snow.
Solo Snow is an apt name for an exhibition of the work of an artist for whom wordplay is both a modus operandi and a key to understanding what he’s up to.
Snow is a pioneer of media arts, an experimental filmmaker, a composer and musician, a sculptor, photographer and painter.
He continues — at age 83 — to work with any available technology to create works with many layers of meaning. But with the clues Snow gives in the titles of the sound and video installations in this exhibition, the concepts can become clear.
Explanations do help, and are provided in a catalogue that includes some of Snow’s notes on the making of the works and how they are to be installed.
Condensation: a Cove Story is a video that depicts the typical fast-changing weather on Canada’s Atlantic coast. The work speeds through changes in condensation — fog, rain and mist — thanks to timelapse photography. The video itself is thus condensed.
The Corner of Braque and Picasso Streets is a live video of the intersection of Berri and Ste. Catherine Sts. But the video isn’t projected on the usual flat screen that has always convincingly depicted space and motion, Snow writes in the catalogue. Instead, the scene is projected onto and through a stack of gallery plinths of various dimensions placed in front of the screen. This makes the scene abstract “in a way that recalls cubism” as invented by Braque and Picasso, Snow writes.
Snow was known in the 1960s for the Walking Woman, which he used in silhouette form in paintings and films. He revisits the flattening of an image in Observer, in which an X on the floor invites you to stand under an apparatus that projects a flattened image of the top of your head and body onto the floor next to you. It’s a simple demonstration of the compression that exists in all photographic images, Snow writes.
Curator Louise Déry said that both she and Snow have lived in Chicoutimi, which created an instant connec- tion between them that has borne fruit in several collaborations over the years.
“He’s a national treasure,” she said.
Déry produced Solo Snow for Le Fresnoy — Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, France, and it was shown in Istanbul
before coming to Montreal.
Solo Snow continues until Feb. 16 at Galerie de l’UQÀM, 1400 Berri St., Judith Jasmin Pavilion, Suite J-R 120. For more information, visit galerie.uqam.ca. Another treasure — of a local sort — is Miriam Lanail, who studied art as a young woman at the École des beaux-arts and Concordia, but later devoted herself to teaching, raising two daughters and caring for her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s.
“I would remind her of old things,” she said in an interview. “It stirred my own memories, and after she died (in 2009) I continued to draw on my memories in my paintings.”
Now, at 69, Lanail is presenting an exhibition about the Plateau Mont Royal of her youth.
Echoes in the Snow, which depicts Baron Byng High School circa 1958, is one of the works.
As with her best paintings, Lanail consulted photographs for architectural details. That brings out her technical skills, which she combines with a naive style consistent with her subject matter.
Lanail said she will move on new subjects once she has fulfilled her “mandate” related to her childhood. “I feel like I’m starting new, with a new pair of eyes.” Miriam Lanail: My Plateau Childhood continues until Sunday at Galerie Mile End, 5345 Parc Ave. Open noon to 8 p.m. Saturday, to 5 p.m. Sunday.
Holly King makes maquettes of landscapes and
photographs them, turning twigs into trees and pebbles into boulders. Her fractal images represent a whole that is just a bit unsettling.
“The intention is not trickery, but to make a compel- ling image that allows people to find their own meaning,” she said at her vernissage at Art Mûr last Saturday.
The Grand Canyon series of photographs on display are a new direction for King, who has left a colourful romanticism for a black-and-white style that refers to drawing and photography.
King said that when she visited the Grand Canyon, it was enveloped in a mist that obscured distances. What remained were ghostly but modest tableaus that only hinted at the unseen majesty.
So King made her maquettes with only the foregrounds constructed as usual.
Behind t hem were her photographs of what she did see, and in the background she hung transparencies of the distant views that were hidden during her visit by the mist.
The faint mountaintops in some of the backgrounds conjure the contrasty images captured by photographers of the Old West, with their giant tripods, glass plates and tents. Holly King — Grand Can
yon: Unseen continues until March 2 at Art Mûr, 5826 St. Hubert St., along with exhibitions of work by Éric Lamontagne and Judith Berry. For more information, visit artmur.com.