Michael Snow: Jack Shainman Gallery

although he's best known for now-classic experimental films similar as Wavelength, 1966-67, and La Region centrale, 1971 Michael Snow's gallery exhibition "Powers of Two" revealed him to be a hyperprolific artist whose mad-scientist inventiveness has engaged a wide range of media, materials, and techniques above the past forty years. His new videos, photographs, and photo-based statuarys and installations are brainy, playful performed investigations of the technical and cultural constructednes of present perception. Snow's latest work also bares him as an obsessive archivist who recompose sequenc uncompounded bodys from his own oeuvre, although these materialist "auto-biographies" are more musical than chronological in form The central work presented in this exhibition is Biographie, 2004 a picture work based on documentation of Snow's Walking Woman work from the '60 The volume traces the schizo trajectory of this charmingly generic image of a female pedestrian, which originated as a cardboard stencil and continues to wander quite through his own work and that of friends, in myriad public and private situations, traversing materials as various as vinyl way banners, newsprint, drawing and paint, outdoor graffiti, carburet of iron and staged photographs. Both the work and the exhibition play upon a jazzy (Finnegans Wake-inspired) configuration of theme and variation. The positive and negative halves of a stencil, the forehead and back of an image, viewer and viewed, advanced in years and new, original and transcript the event and its representation, male and female, and reality and fiction are so many riffs upon the mathematical term from which the exhibition takes its name.

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The phrase also provides the title of the show's greatest in quantity impressive work, a sixteen-foot-long photographic transparency that hung from the ceiling, dividing the gallery like a see-through curtain. Snow's version of Olympia, this image present to views a woman reclining in bed, fixing us with her frank gaze while a postcoital shapeless mass of a man snores upon her breast. Her smiling organ of visions seem to follow you everywhere as you put in motion from her "front" to her "back" and back again. This two-dimensional object's sum of two units sides seem equal but may not be exactly the same: Rumor has it that the title of individual of the books on the shelf is different depending upon which side it's viewed from. And we come by the feeling there must be other tricky discrepancies hiding here, as the depicted space and light of the transparency morph uncertainly into those of the gallery, producing a shimmering disorientation that is at one time optical and physical. Paris de Jugement le and/or State of the Arts, 2003 plays the same game on the other hand in a goofier key. It's an ambiguous photopainting upon cloth of three naked women seen from behind as they contemplate the painted bodies in Cezanne's Large Bathers; the thing's as comical (I want to say smart-ass) as it is aesthetically undecideable. Line Drawing with Synapse, 2003 is the greatest in quantity paradoxical and maddening work upon view. A pair of ultrathin light boxe hang from wires, backs to each other with images facing without about two feet apart. They illuminate (identical?) transparencies, each of which present to views a camera photographing itself in a mirror (or is it a shoot-out between sum of two units identical cameras?). This piece looks to open up an impossible space between its sum of two units flat images of images and hints that vision is a magical, sometimes jerry-rigged fact that happens in the no-place between physical sensation and mental perception, in the difference between a viewing here and a viewed elsewhere.

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