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February 9, 2017 – Review
Michael Snow’s “Powers of Two”
Jacob Korczynski
Throughout an expansive practice that spans more than half a century, Michael Snow has questioned the conditions of perception and pushed against the material properties of multiple mediums. Snow’s work has remained relevant to successive generations of artists because of the generosity it can extend to viewers. In encountering his best work, bodies become a primary site of meaning, a tether between the intellectual and the visceral, the psychological and the physical.
However, there are two sides to every story, and as much as Snow’s work invites it can also exclude, with many of his most iconic pieces fetishizing the bodies of women, creating a space for the viewer determined by a male gaze that is at worst lecherous and at best limiting, reinforcing the boundaries of a gender binary—a power of two. Two Sides to Every Story is also the title of one of Snow’s most visionary works, a 16mm film installation from 1974 that explores the tension between the recto and verso of an image, and while it does not appear in this exhibition, its formal conceit is directly connected to Powers of Two (2003), a large-scale photo installation from which the title of this exhibition is derived.
In the …