Snyder’s Austere Columns

Telephone Poles to Totems

By Thomas Albright

A few months back a young artist named Dan Snyder bowed in at the Wenger Gallery with a display of big ceramic figure sculptures that looked like ancient relics from another civilization that had just been uncovered.

Now, Snyder is back at the 855 Montgomery street address with a more recent group of sculptures carved in wood. They show that he has already moved on to new and even richer digs.

The new pieces are carved, or more precisely torn and hacked, from old telephone pole timbers. Some are busts that sit on pedestals, some are encrusted with rags and adapt various genre poses, most are simple, austere columns that stand with a somber, awesome, totem-like presence throughout the gallery.

Snyder shapes his material into evocations of the human figure with a minimum of rough-hewn alteration — the thrusting ledge of a brow over deep recesses where one would expect images, the squared-off block of a jaw, the subtle tapering from hooded to torso: sometimes he helps things along with a touch of muted pigmentation, but never so his pieces lose their sense of telephone pole-ness, with their holed chinks and flaking, their masts slowly falling victim to dry rot.

The whole effect is that of sculptures unearthed from the workshop of some ancient shaman — artist whose carving was left unfinished, interrupted perhaps by some terminal disaster, although the figures to which Snyder’s pieces allude are also distinctly those of Modern Man, and in spirit his sculpture is as close to Giacometti as to Easter Island.

This recreation of civilizations and entire cultures in one artist’s own images is one of the strongest strains in Bay Region art right now, whether one thinks of Manuel Neri’s reconstructions of classical figure sculpture, Clayton Bailey’s fantastic fossils of legendary creatures, David Gilhooly’s Frog Culture, Robert Arneson’s assimilation of everything from Chinese celadon to pre-Columbian terra-cotta to project his psychological self-images, or the various mythological worlds of people like William Wiley, Roy De Forest and Joan Brown.

Hopefully, someone will organize a show around this theme of the artist as anthropologist of his own imagined world someday; at any rate, Snyder is among the most convincing of these Bay 

San Francisco Chronicle, July 11, 1973