My tour of Toronto’s first Gallery Weekend started on a Saturday morning at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, where artist Andy Patton joined Petro in discussing a suite of new Carol Wainio paintings. In view of Wainio’s fluffy, Rococo landscapes, Patton reminded a small audience that paint is essentially “just colored glue.” A few days later, during the opening days of Greater Toronto Art 2021 (GTA), the inaugural edition of a triennial survey of Toronto artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I stopped in front of a Tony Romano sculpture (one element of a larger installation titled Between the Lilies and the Birds, 2021): a small, rough face rendered in ceramic. Big blue tears ornamented its right cheek, and the word “SAD” was carved into its chin. I left the museum listening to Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Banisters” (Republican music, sorry) and walked home through the very strong smell of chocolate (the museum is next to a chocolate factory). Something humbling was happening. The city was coming out of what’s been, by some measures, the longest consecutive lockdown of any major international metropolis. The exhausted, perennial questions that attend art’s relationship to event—why do this, who is it for, do …

Throughout an expansive practice that spans more than half a century, Michael Snow has questioned the conditions of perception and pushed against the material properties of multiple mediums. Snow’s work has remained relevant to successive generations of artists because of the generosity it can extend to viewers. In encountering his best work, bodies become a primary site of meaning, a tether between the intellectual and the visceral, the psychological and the physical. However, there are two sides to every story, and as much as Snow’s work invites it can also exclude, with many of his most iconic pieces fetishizing the bodies of women, creating a space for the viewer determined by a male gaze that is at worst lecherous and at best limiting, reinforcing the boundaries of a gender binary—a power of two. Two Sides to Every Story is also the title of one of Snow’s most visionary works, a 16mm film installation from 1974 that explores the tension between the recto and verso of an image, and while it does not appear in this exhibition, its formal conceit is directly connected to Powers of Two (2003), a large-scale photo installation from which the title of this exhibition is derived. In the …