Above: Still from the video Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids)

Michael Snow: Solar Breath

(Northern Caryatids) 

Starting 30 years ago, I constructed (and continue to work on every summer) a log cabin 9 x 9 metres in size, in a remote coastal area in Newfoundland. The weather is an important factor in one’s experience of this place. Every summer I am able to spend one or two months there. Once or twice each summer, a mysterious wind performance takes place in one of the windows, about an hour before sunset.

For several summers I have attempted to capture this wind phenomenon on tape or film, with inconsistent results. Some summers it never happened at all. What I saw in these sun-and-wind events was their potential as art. I did not record these “events” to share this modest phenomenon from my daily life with others. No, the rich play of light, surfaces and durations said to me: this real, unstaged event contains the elements which are essential for a contemplative time-light-motion work of art, a “motion picture” with “plastic” values and reverberant associations which will reward many viewings.

In the videotape, Solar Breath… , which I have made of these windows—I designed and built the window and my wife, Peggy Gale, made the curtain—the “gestures” which produce them often include the curtain blowing high enough into the room for one to have (each time framed differently) a view of the outside. One glimpses evergreen trees, and stacks and piles of cut firewood. A very northern Canadian wilderness scene.

One also glimpses a blue, gridded, metal-framed rectangle, very sci-fi, very “unnatural.” It is a solar panel, which is charging a battery that is powering the camera. The cable from the panel is visible as it comes through the window/screen. The most amazing thing is that often the cloth flaps out, then is sucked back against the almost invisible plane of the screen (smack!) and then holds, still, each time a different composition of folds, for as long as four seconds.

While on one level, Solar Breath is merely a fixed-camera documentary recording, 62 minutes long, it is also the result of years of attention.

Michael Snow, September 2002 .  Excerpted from the publication Michael Snow: Souffle solaire / Solar Breath, Michael Snow & Louise Déry, Galerie de l'UQAM, 2005

 Michael Snow, born in 1929, is among Canada's most senior and respected visual artists. Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Galerie de l'UQAM, Montreal, and in Rotterdam and Dublin in 2007. This is the first showing in Atlantic Canada.