Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids), still from video installation, 2002

Private Collection, Toronto

Starting 30 years ago, I constructed (and continue to work on every summer) a log cabin 9 × 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 phenomena 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 this window – I designed and built the curtain -the “gestures” which produce the images 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 from 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”, Galerie de l’UQAM, 2005.