Michael Snow

Over the past half-century, through works such as the milestone avant-garde film Wavelength (1967), Toronto-based artist Michael Snow (born 1928) has explored the nature of perception, consciousness, language and temporality. This last theme is particularly relevant to his latest artist’s book, which is dedicated to the life of his adventurous mother, Marie-Antoinette Françoise Carmen Levesque Snow Roig, whose trove of family photographs provide a narrative throughline here.
Snow consolidates his mother’s photo albums, presenting a total of 1,500 images. In a tenderly penned foreword, he explains the simple impetus for the project: “[The photographs] are so beautiful and so historic that I wish to share them with others.” While he has integrated small samples of these albums into his work before—notably figuring in his landmark catalog for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1970, Michael Snow/A Survey—this volume provides a much larger and more unified selection. As a result, the compiled images tell a more complete biographical story—one that Snow leaves intact on the surface. He brings his own layer of interpretation to the photographs by drawing out patterns within the collection and his mother’s writing. Snow creates an album that is fully his own, embracing, as art historian Martha Langford describes, a “deep understanding and surrender to form.”

For years an out-of-print rarity, Canadian artist, filmmaker and musician Michael Snow's (born 1928) classic 1975 artist's book Cover to Cover is available once again, in this facsimile edition. Unconstrained by discipline, Snow famously remarked that his sculptures were made by a musician, his films by a painter. Flipping through Cover to Cover, which is composed entirely of photographs in narrative sequence, one might describe it as a book made by a filmmaker. Each individual page features a distinct moment, seen from one perspective on the front, and from a diametrically opposed angle on the back, occasionally pivoting between interior and exterior spaces. Midway through the book, the images are inverted such that the volume must be turned upside-down to be looked at right-side up. The result is an elegant, disorienting study in simultaneity. With this work, wrote Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Michael Snow has challenged the reader's/viewer's notion of a book, indeed one's very notion of perception.”