Yes Snow Show

The exhibition at BFI Gallery consists of several distinctly different moving-image gallery works. The individuality of each reinforces the others' singular characteristics.

It is not a retrospective. In my career Little Walk of 1965 (a Walking Woman Work) was the first gallery film installation, followed in 1971 by De La which is a real-time video installation that uses the camera-activating machine that I invented to make the film La Région Centrale (to be shown at BFI Southbank as part of the screenings accompanying the Gallery exhibition). Chronologically next was the film installation Two Sides to Every Story (1974).

At BFI Gallery I'm showing Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) (2002), an unaltered video recording of a natural phenomenon. The subject is a window with two parts and two left and right suspended curtains. As invisible wind makes the left curtain billow forward, each time this happens the curtain moves in a different gesture, revealing more or less of the outside…After causing the billowing out, the wind sucks the curtain back, to slap (a loud smack) it against the view outside but also against the wall the work is projected on, in the gallery. That it is a two-dimensional image (not a curtain) is asserted by this smack. Each time this happens the curtain is held still in extraordinary fold compositions for astonishingly long periods of time. Each fold composition is different. There was no post-shooting manipulation, it's pure solar breath magic.

In contrast, another work, SSHTOORRTY (2005) is staged and acted. A two-minute film was divided into equal parts superimposed one on top of the other, creating unexpected narrative, spatial and chromatic shifts. That / Cela / Dat (1999), on the other hand, continues the motifs and formal principles of a film of mine entitled So Is This (1982), but was conceived to consciously use the gallery viewing situation as one of its conditions and subjects. It is composed of three alternating image sources; three 'screens' simultaneously in three languages, English, French and Dutch. The text is addressed to you, the spectator of the work. The exhibition also includes Observer (1974) and Sheeploop (2000), a work shown in different locations around the building, so that context will perhaps affect one's perception of the work, a quiet landscape in an English tradition.

Michael Snow, September 2008