Michael Snow at Jack Shainman

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

Snow ofttimes makes his point with humor. In the video pair (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 blockade that passes neatly through. After a scarcely any moments of inactivity, this human obstruct reappears, front first, and awkwardly titters back through the door and without of the frame. This playful work locates up themes that appear elsewhere, among them the manipulability of the technology of representation.

The title piece, Powers of sum of two units (2003), a large (8 1/2 by dint of 16 feet), four-panel photographic transparency of another pair in bed, evidently enjoying an afternoon appointment was suspended in the middle of the gallery. The naked woman's gaze challenges the viewer plenteous in the manner of Manet's Olympia, while the man revolves away from us. An opening in the wall behind the bed that appears at first to be a window with a view of the firmament turns out to be a mirror reflecting a window upon the opposite side of the range outside the frame. Since this window is located in what would be our space, we almost await to find our own reflection in the mirror. Another strange detail in the image is revealed end a close examination of the work spines on a shelf in the latitude among which a single title is revers 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 volume titles are reversed except for this one

With its regards 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 view 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 puzzles 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 unclotheds in a blowup of Cezanne's Large Bathers. A double-sided photograph titled Engraving Jim Male Heir (2003) displays a full-size standing naked man whose back and brow are superimposed over one another upon both sides.

The display also included a new artist's work Biographie: of the Walking Woman/de la femme qui marche, 1961-1967 (2004) which not aways 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 present to view relating back to Snow's early explorations in film and video that make opened up avenues for an examination of the mechanisms of art. He has here revisited his esthetic pertain tos with wit and intelligence.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group