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Forecast: Snow
The artist's new installation in windows of Toronto's Pantages Hotel vividly blends narrative with abstraction, and metaphor with real life
SARAH MILROY
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
With all of the fanfare of the Toronto International Film Festival over the past few weeks, it was easy to miss a quieter world premiere, occurring at a downtown Toronto street. The filmmaker in question this time was no Hollywood schmoozer, but instead the quiet, soulful éminence grise of experimental film, Michael Snow.
His new release was, in fact, seven new releases -- or at least one two-hour work comprising seven films that he is showing on seven screens simultaneously. And these are not screens in the conventional sense, but rather plasma screens set in seven window openings on an exterior wall of the downtown Pantages Hotel and Spa.
Drive by the building's Victoria Street façade at night, and you can see Snow's images flickering and glowing. (The work is on an endless loop, so it runs all night and day.) Tucked around the corner from the glitzy media barrage that is Dundas Square -- an illuminated bazaar of ever-changing commercial signage -- Snow's The Windows Suite mimics and then betters the language of the street, turning the technology of mass marketing to artistic use, and impregnating the streetscape with new resonance. As a work of public art, it has everything going for it.
Snow's love affair with the window motif has a long history -- an entire touring exhibition last year was devoted to the theme in his work -- but he dates his fascination to 1960, and his sculptural assemblage titled Window, now owned by the National Gallery of Canada.
It's a concatenation of found objects and passages of brilliant paint applied to a weather-beaten, wooden window frame. The viewer is invited to see it from all sides.
The frame haunts him still. One of Snow's most recent DVD projections, Solar Breath (2005), which was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last year, continues this theme, offering a long slow look out the window of the artist's rustic cabin, and the diaphanous kitchen curtain that sways in and out with the evening breeze.
"That was the thing with Wavelength," Snow says, referring to his 1967 classic film of that title, which features a slow zoom toward the artist's studio windows. "The windows are like eye sockets. You look out at the world through those openings." Like the camera, the skull is an enclosed space within which interpretation and meaning are generated, and from which perception flows.
The Windows Suite is a kind of compendium of Snow strategies. At times, the imagery in the seven windows is co-ordinated, with Snow suggesting narratives unfolding behind the walls -- like his pair of night watchmen who prowl from room to room. (We see their flashlight beams flickering from frame to frame.) Other passages are more slapstick, like the sequence in which workmen carry a ladder from window to window, or the moment when we watch a young boy bouncing from bed to bed, apparently leaping between the windows. Blink, and the scenario shifts again. Fish swim in a brilliant blue sea, appearing, disappearing and reappearing again as they make their way from screen to screen.
In one incendiary variation, a fire appears to burst forth in the hotel's lower floors, making its way up inside the interior, only to be extinguished by the water jet of a fire hose. Snow has always been a sucker for a visual pun, and he delights in them here.
The Windows Suite also reflects the hotel's unique role as a kind of free zone in semi-nomadic, metropolitan culture. In one sequence, a woman arrives, hangs up her coat and closes the curtains, shutting us out. In another, a towel-clad man wanders around like a lost soul. Another hotel guest lifts weights and exercises in solitude. As luck would have it, he appears in the window directly below the hotel's gym windows, which gives rise, occasionally, to a wonderful conflation of artifice and reality.
Then there are the abstract sequences, in which dazzling monochrome panels of vivid colour strobe, or rise and fall with the chromatic gradations of the rainbow -- sheer celebrations of sight.
One of the successes, here, is the way the work changes our perception of the city around it. Snow's passages of abstract colour suggest a digitized version of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, but the hotel scenes blend in with the surrounding spectacle of the city in strange and often unexpected ways. You catch yourself noticing, for example, that the real hotel rooms in the tower above have curtains not unlike those on Snow's faux plasma screens. People come and go inside those real-life frames as well. Time unfolds, and the spectacle of the city starts to feel like a projection of the artist's imagination, laden with stories and rich with unfolding metaphors. Watching, you wonder: Is art imitating life, or is it the other way around?
Michael Snow's The Windows Suite is on permanent view on the east façade of Pantages hotel and spa, 200 Victoria St., Toronto.
The artist's new installation in windows of Toronto's Pantages Hotel vividly blends narrative with abstraction, and metaphor with real life
SARAH MILROY
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
With all of the fanfare of the Toronto International Film Festival over the past few weeks, it was easy to miss a quieter world premiere, occurring at a downtown Toronto street. The filmmaker in question this time was no Hollywood schmoozer, but instead the quiet, soulful éminence grise of experimental film, Michael Snow.
His new release was, in fact, seven new releases -- or at least one two-hour work comprising seven films that he is showing on seven screens simultaneously. And these are not screens in the conventional sense, but rather plasma screens set in seven window openings on an exterior wall of the downtown Pantages Hotel and Spa.
Drive by the building's Victoria Street façade at night, and you can see Snow's images flickering and glowing. (The work is on an endless loop, so it runs all night and day.) Tucked around the corner from the glitzy media barrage that is Dundas Square -- an illuminated bazaar of ever-changing commercial signage -- Snow's The Windows Suite mimics and then betters the language of the street, turning the technology of mass marketing to artistic use, and impregnating the streetscape with new resonance. As a work of public art, it has everything going for it.
Snow's love affair with the window motif has a long history -- an entire touring exhibition last year was devoted to the theme in his work -- but he dates his fascination to 1960, and his sculptural assemblage titled Window, now owned by the National Gallery of Canada.
It's a concatenation of found objects and passages of brilliant paint applied to a weather-beaten, wooden window frame. The viewer is invited to see it from all sides.
The frame haunts him still. One of Snow's most recent DVD projections, Solar Breath (2005), which was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last year, continues this theme, offering a long slow look out the window of the artist's rustic cabin, and the diaphanous kitchen curtain that sways in and out with the evening breeze.
"That was the thing with Wavelength," Snow says, referring to his 1967 classic film of that title, which features a slow zoom toward the artist's studio windows. "The windows are like eye sockets. You look out at the world through those openings." Like the camera, the skull is an enclosed space within which interpretation and meaning are generated, and from which perception flows.
The Windows Suite is a kind of compendium of Snow strategies. At times, the imagery in the seven windows is co-ordinated, with Snow suggesting narratives unfolding behind the walls -- like his pair of night watchmen who prowl from room to room. (We see their flashlight beams flickering from frame to frame.) Other passages are more slapstick, like the sequence in which workmen carry a ladder from window to window, or the moment when we watch a young boy bouncing from bed to bed, apparently leaping between the windows. Blink, and the scenario shifts again. Fish swim in a brilliant blue sea, appearing, disappearing and reappearing again as they make their way from screen to screen.
In one incendiary variation, a fire appears to burst forth in the hotel's lower floors, making its way up inside the interior, only to be extinguished by the water jet of a fire hose. Snow has always been a sucker for a visual pun, and he delights in them here.
The Windows Suite also reflects the hotel's unique role as a kind of free zone in semi-nomadic, metropolitan culture. In one sequence, a woman arrives, hangs up her coat and closes the curtains, shutting us out. In another, a towel-clad man wanders around like a lost soul. Another hotel guest lifts weights and exercises in solitude. As luck would have it, he appears in the window directly below the hotel's gym windows, which gives rise, occasionally, to a wonderful conflation of artifice and reality.
Then there are the abstract sequences, in which dazzling monochrome panels of vivid colour strobe, or rise and fall with the chromatic gradations of the rainbow -- sheer celebrations of sight.
One of the successes, here, is the way the work changes our perception of the city around it. Snow's passages of abstract colour suggest a digitized version of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, but the hotel scenes blend in with the surrounding spectacle of the city in strange and often unexpected ways. You catch yourself noticing, for example, that the real hotel rooms in the tower above have curtains not unlike those on Snow's faux plasma screens. People come and go inside those real-life frames as well. Time unfolds, and the spectacle of the city starts to feel like a projection of the artist's imagination, laden with stories and rich with unfolding metaphors. Watching, you wonder: Is art imitating life, or is it the other way around?
Michael Snow's The Windows Suite is on permanent view on the east façade of Pantages hotel and spa, 200 Victoria St., Toronto.