Michael Snow. Walking Women. A Biography

In late 1960 Michael Snow made several naturalistic flat cut-out cardboard figures which used the/a wall as their background. In early 1961, to make one of these, he drew-then cut out with a matte knife-a side view of a female figure walking, 152 cm tall, within a drawn rectangle on a piece of cardboard. No model was used. Long story short: realising that he had a positive and a negative stencil, and that this two-dimensional figure was easily reproducible, he decided to use this "mother" cut-out to make some variations on its surface (but not its contour) and its placement. This cut-out was not made for unforeseen uses, but once started, new possibilities continued to occur to the artist. Thus all his work between 1961 and 1967 used the outline or silhouette of the original cut-out as both tool and subject. Biography of The Walking Woman consists of the juxtaposition and the many-sided sequential ordering of a selection from these deliberate, inadvertent, and by-chance photographic documents-conflating the trivial and the sublime appearances of The Walking Woman.

Michael Snow was born in Toronto, where he currently lives. This internationally renowned multimedia artist is a musician, painter, sculptor, photographer, video and cinema creator all at once. He has created sound installations (his films have been presented in festivals across the world). Many retrospectives of his work have been exhibited worldwide (at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), the Centre National de la Photographie and the Pompidou Centre (Paris), in Tokyo, New York.).