In Recent Works, his first solo show in Austria, Canadian artist Michael Snow shows photographic works and film installations from the past ten years. His film works are already familiar to Viennese and Austrian audiences as his experimental films have long been part of the collection of the Austrian Film Museum. During the exhibition, the museum will be cooperating with the Secession to show a program of early and rarely screened films by Snow.

Born in 1929, Snow has worked as a professional musician since the 1950s and began in the early 1960s to explore painting and sculpture, soon also developing an intense interest in experimental film and photography. With Wavelength (1966/67), he created what Annette Michelson has called a “paradigmatic” work of film history that also represents a turning point in his artistic career. He has now been working for over fifty years in a wide range of media, often operating on thresholds, exploring one medium from the perspective of another.

The seven works on show at the Secession offer an exemplary insight into the broad range of Snow’s work. His systematic examination of the structures, procedures, and limits of the various media is coupled with a discussion of questions concerning the perception of reality and art, always recognizing the “unpredictability of the spectator”* (Martha Langford).

In Paris de jugement Le and / or State of the Arts, 2003, the realism of the naked viewers on the photograph meets with Cézanne’s painted nude and the actual viewers. In her essay, Martha Langford* talks about “staging a confrontation,” adding: “The image compresses and opposes representations of hand-made abstraction (culture) and machine-made realism (nature), the latter eclipsing the former in a figurative layering of authorities on the photographic surface of emulsion on cloth.”

Like its predecessor Wavelength, the video work Solar Breath, 2002, consists of a single shot, showing a window where a rare natural phenomenon is taking place. Nature and culture overlap as the violent billowing of the curtain is accompanied by the everyday sounds from the domestic space. The footage was not processed.

In the Way, 2011, is a road movie at street level, filmed from a truck. The projection is almost impossible to avoid, it stands in the way, or the viewer is in the way, walking through the image. But everyone can do it “in their own way,” as Michael Snow writes.

The Corner of Braque and Picasso Streets, 2009/2012: A camera installed outside the building shoots footage of the immediate vicinity, which is shown in the exhibition space on an uneven projection surface broken up by plinths. The title refers to the place where the work was first shown in 2009, in Barcelona, the city where Cubism was born.

The second photographic work in the show, Powers of Two, 2003, gives an inside view of both an apartment and a love affair. For Snow, the mathematical term “powers of two” is “an appropriate title for a two-sided work featuring a couple”. On four transparent photographs hanging freely in the space, we see a copulating couple in their bedroom, life size. The viewer is captured by the gaze of the woman who is smiling at the camera. Or is she watching the sunrise or sunset whose reflection can be seen in the picture? Time stands still, but we know what happens next. Uneasiness mixes with the curiosity of the voyeur, raising the question of what can be seen on the other side. The photographer as a perpetrator and conservator, the viewer as an accomplice, as someone in the know, and finally as part of the picture.

The video installation Piano Sculpture, 2009, features Snow himself as the pianist. Four projection surfaces form an audiovisual space as the musician plays the same piece four times but with different improvisations. The differences in sound and image create a dense, layered effect, raising questions of time, synchronization, and repetition. But Piano Sculpture can also be experienced simply as an intense sensory perception.

SSHTOORRTY, 2005, is a short story made shorter still: both the title (“short” and “story”) and the film material (35-mm stock) use overlapping, just as the protagonists sometimes lie on top of each other—“transparency over transparency” is what Snow calls it, adding: “The work is a moving picture about a moving picture.” The end of the ongoing drama is clear at the start. Before and after blur in the moment.

In cooperation with Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien

*Martha Langford: “Translation, Migration, Fascination: Motion Pictures by Michael Snow”, in: Michael Snow. Recent Works, exhibition catalogue, Secession, Vienna 2012.