Glen Snow is an artist investigating painting as an object of material thinking; as the concrete paintingobject. He lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, having gained an MFA (First Class) from Elam School of Art, University of Auckland (UoA) and a BFA (Hons) Painting from University of the Arts London (UAL), Camberwell College of Arts.
Glen Snow is a current PhD candidate at the University of Auckland (UoA). His thesis titled, Painting and the Materiality of Thought: Creating the Grounds for Thinking Matter, takes the question of how and when thinking occurs through the painting medium as opposed to its organisation through language, and what this can tell us about thought as a superordinate term beyond what Western philosophical traditions have supposed over the last two millennia.
Being physical objects, the work concerns less the painting as a picture than it being the thing to be pictured before us. Often, the paintings form their own ground, where the structures and support occupy painterly space instead of being hidden behind a surface. In coining the phrase paintingobject – run together for emphasis – the idea of ‘concreteness’ rather than abstractness is being rethought. The presentation of painting rather than its representations starts with the very paint used, which belongs more to the building trades and has been put to work as something that functions to bind or support its own membrane. In this way, instead of being employed for illusory or optical depiction, the medium of paint has been construed as a glue, filler, sealer, putty or laminate, closer to a plastic that can also be cut, repositioned and collaged. Likewise, the roles of glues and fillers have been used in excess of their jobs to become paint. Drawing takes the form of a cut or hollow gouge waiting to be filled, of sanded or scratched surface or as cleaved edges (in both senses of that word).
At times, this has meant the very support and composition are constructed at once. At others, various discarded products, having lost their economy, become the bits and pieces in structuring a composition. Yet each work operates more like a painting in parts, or ‘pieces of painting’ – assemblages rather than an ensemble or total composition. As a concrete object, it reminds us it is in the world and of it. Its currency is not our mental transcendence nor an optical tracing of a mind adrift on a canvas but an encounter with the matter that includes our embodied immanence.
Glen's first solo exhibitions Would Not Frame and Fat Yellow, were held at Antoinette Godkin Art House, Auckland, with a solo presentation, Thick & Thin at 30 Upstairs, Wellington. His work has been selected for curated exhibitions such as Grid / Colour / Plane at Malcolm Smith Gallery and On Hold to Read at Morrinsville Gallery. He has been commissioned for work at the Project Wall, Te Tuhi and has been a regular finalist on touring exhibitions of the Arts House Trust (TSB Bank Awards). Glen has coordinated and curated local and international group exhibitions, such as Materialised at Two Rooms Gallery and at Morrinsville Gallery, and a two-staged exhibition, Painting Now: Out of Elam, at The Vivian Gallery and then Arts House Trust. Glen Snow also writes on art and has reviewed exhibitions for EyeContact Site.