This program of renowned Canadian artist Michael Snow's rarely screened slide and audio tape presentation, A Casing Shelved, and the 1988 film Seated Figures, is presented as a component of Snow's Bay Area residency, sponsored by the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco Cinematheque. In addition to a lecture at the Art Institute and film screening at the Cinematheque, works by Snow in various media will be on display at the Walter/McBean Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We wish to thank the Canadian Consulate General and Canadian Studies, UC Berkeley, for their support. Seated Figures (50 mins, Color, 16mm). "For all his conceptual sophistication, Snow subscribes to a casual, all-encompassing Cage aesthetic. He's deceptively artless, a master of the visual deadpan. While trafficking in geological abstraction, he arrests the film's frantic motion, freezing some blurry onrush or a frame of flowing water. A soundtrack of coughs, yawns, and humming projector creates a further displacement. The images are distanced-accompanied by the muffled noises of an audience watching a movie. Hence the mysteriously inert title. Seated Figures is about its audience. Not only are we sent flying face down over the earth, but Snow reverses the oldest concept in image-making-he juxtaposes our seated, static figures against a constantly moving ground." --J. Hoberman, Village Voice A Casing Shelved (40 mins, 35mm color slide with audio tape). "The bookshelf in A Casing Shelved is one Michael Snow had in his studio on Canal Street in New York and on which he had accumulated a great number of objects used in the realization of various works of art. The bookshelf appeared in Wavelength...As a 'talking picture,' A Casing Shelved is an exploration of the relationship between word and image. Here, things represented in one form are transformed into another through the use of verbal language...'When I first thought of it, I didn't think it was autobiographical as much as that there are so many ways to read the significance of things and in that case everything had personal significance; it seemed interesting to account somehow for how it got there. I couldn't really account for the position it was in but I could perhaps account for how it came to exist in my life...The bookshelf was something between a found object and a conscious work.' (Snow)" --Pierre Théberge, "About 30 Works by Michael Snow"