Michael Snow, “The Viewing of Six New Works,” installation view, seven looped video projections, silent, touch design recording technology by Greg Hermanovic, 2012
Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through February 11, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-645-1701
www.jackshainman.com
Canadian conceptual artist Michael Snow has been creating cutting-edge multimedia works for more than fifty years, including such seminal experimental films as Wavelength and Corpus Collosum and such site-specific projects as “Flightstop” and “The Audience.” In his latest gallery show, the eighty-two-year-old Guggenheim Fellow and chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres explores the creation and perception of visual art itself in the four-part installation “In the Way.” Visitors first encounter “La Ferme,” in which Snow takes 16mm footage of grazing cows, then arranges eleven successive frames horizontally, the way it was actually seen as the film was made, instead of vertically, the way the frames would appear in the developed film itself; the 1998 work announces that you are in for a unique experience that is going to examine ways of seeing while laying bare the process behind it all. In a room off to the left, “In the Way” (2011) features a twenty-three-minute video loop projected onto the floor; you have to stand right on it in order to get the full impact of the panning shots taken from a truck, making you feel like you’re moving over green fields, dirt, asphalt, and rocks, each surface giving you a different visceral experience. Experience is at the heart of “The Viewing of Six New Works” (2012), as Snow projects seven changing geometric shapes, in varying bright colors, onto the walls of a large room, each image shifting based on how the eye reads a rectangular work of art on the wall, following ocular patterns of perception and forcing viewers to see these images in the same way. “When attention is not being paid to it,” Snow explains in the press release, “the object/rectangle is not there.” The fourth piece, 1985’s “Exchange,” involves a holographic set-up in a daring red that falls short of expectations, with little happening as you move around it. Continuing at Jack Shainman in Chelsea through February 11, “In the Way” is another engaging example of how we look at art, from one of the masters of the genre.