Sunday, February 21, 2010

hello with snow

Hello all-

I've been writing on art sporadically and decided to share!

What is here is not necessarily polished or finished

I just wanted to give it a home and allow feedback

I learn from your comments and i appreciate them!

To start I am going to post my reaction to michael snow's recent snow exhibition at the power plant in toronto

I say reaction instead of review.

This is not a review
it is more like a poem
and tribute

i called it kid snow
for a show that was so fresh and pure

jason p schiedel

__________________________________________________________________

Who is MS?

Electricity. Shimmering thought.

Cascading waves of sensation. A tumbling effect. Dizzy and palpitating.

I see the music first. Quadrupled from above. Tender father.

His crotch is close to the keyboard. Above his fingers comb the keys, brushing. Crescendos of notes, and nonsense; a pattern. The patterns are mesmerizing- terrifying at first. Yet so humble. The gentle effortless flow of a practice that appears like child’s play.

Playing with space and ears and skin. Covering you with endless delight that bristles.

The speakers are over the chamber where the sound comes out. You can look deep into a hole from where the sound emanates. The contradiction of a full absence. Thank you!

Curtains flap in Solar Breath like eyelids, like membranes filled with light, snapping shut, sticking like flypaper. Only to release, relax, and float upon the breeze. Only to happen on rare occasions.

But this is common too: the simple cabin, the sound of food being eaten with muted conversation. Intimate. Two people enjoying the summer air. Perhaps they have made love. Knives tinkle on the plates, and I think I can hear them swallow.

I am encased in an organism through Solar Breath, composed of information. I do not know what this means. The windows are “like” my eyes, the curtains “like” my breath, the voices are the company I keep, represented in the slice of a day that happens like no other day and is nothing and precious and all there is. This is what it’s like to be awake.

The table with the food. The one about the waiter. How plain and procedural. Like Kafka’s beetle with an apple lodged in his back and dust bunnies clinging to his feet getting tangled one in the other. And funny too. The way it goes! Here I love the grace of the reversal. All the shame rinsed away…

The fuckups sucked up. Only to begin again.

That is not something I can speak about. Which is funny because it is composed of words. Each registers in my brain as a sensation. Interior regions pulsing electricity. Expanding. To follow it does make me laugh and cry and I am thankful to the author. It’s sad I can’t say more because it is the greatest work in the exhibition- or the more apparently brilliant because its work is entirely mental- though it admits to being part of the tradition of painting

Is That a conceptual painting? Kind of, if paintings are poems too.

That is always more than one thing.

Is not everything more than one thing?

Is everything a poem?

(This is Michael Snow.)

Now I’m dancing.

It’s passing like wind.

Jason Schiedel

London, Ontario, Feb 2010