Lot 19: Michael James Aleck Snow 1928 - Canadian lucite on aluminum, enamel on wood, steel brackets, nuts and bolts Sideway

Michael James Aleck Snow 1928 - Canadian lucite on aluminum, enamel on wood, steel brackets, nuts and bolts Sideway
73 x 30 x 21 3/4 inches 185.4 x 76.2 x 55.2 centimeters signed and dated 1962 and on verso signed, dated May - June 1962 and inscribed "Toronto" and "The aluminum has been coated with Lucite and the paints are enamel" Literature:"Michael Snow introduces The Walking Woman," video, Art Gallery of Ontario, 2009, viewable at www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO88Yee8nPk (accessed September 14, 2011)
Provenance:Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Montreal Michael Snow is one of Canada's best-known and most influential living artists. His famous Walking Woman series - a remarkably varied array of works that was his focus from 1961 to 1967 - remains the icon of his protean oeuvre. The simple silhouetted female form appears about 200 times, solo or in multiple. She graces Snow's paintings, photography, films and, as in this superb example, his sculpture. In this form she took star turns in art galleries, on the street nationally and internationally, and most famously at Expo 67 in Montreal. Snow memorably rings the changes on the formal and conceptual possibilities of art and our perception of the world with this one image. With it he says something profound about the visual in our consciousness and in our society.
The first Walking Woman pieces were exhibited in 1962 at The Isaacs Gallery in Toronto. Snow's description of these works' inception is disarmingly simple: in the early 1960s he had been occupied with surfaces and planes in abstract painting. He wanted to do something different, to play with the figure, but not in traditional naturalistic ways. He made a large cardboard cut-out of the figure we know as "Walking Woman" and placed it initially on a gallery wall. But, typical of Snow's genius, two radical thoughts ensued: first, that his stencil allowed him to reproduce the figure endlessly, making variations inside the form while retaining the recognizable outline; secondly, Snow said that he "realized that [the form] could be anywhere.....in the world." The Walking Woman helped to lead art out of the protocols, securities and privileges of the gallery onto the street. Sculptural versions such as Sideway performed this escape most effectively. Sideway asserts and then plays with its three-dimensionality. It is massively thick or deep, a manifestly physical slab rather than a simple image. Yet by painting the image's surfaces of the aluminum form in vibrant green and red, Snow takes the sculpture back into the realm of painting. From straight on (rather than sideways), we could be looking at a two-dimensional painting. Snow never lets us rest with one viewpoint; his ethos is one of "both/and," not "either/or."
The social and spatial presence of Sideway are crucial to its potency. We can, of course, move around the walking figure even while she seems to stride towards or away from us. And if we catch a glimpse of her as "just" a painting from one perspective, we are reminded by the assertive platform on which Snow places her that she exists in the round. The social dimensions are again emphasized by the doubleness of Sideway. "She" is a twin, but of the fraternal sort, ironically, given the difference in colour applied by Snow to the iconic outline. And lest we think that we, the audience, control her through our looking, it is also clear in this classic example of Snow's wit that she/they could as easily ignore us and simply look at one another.
We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, for contributing the above essay.