Michael Snow

Snow, was known in Canada and internationally for his abstract painting, public sculptures and the experimental 1967 film “Wavelength.”

“His rigorously intellectual works have brought him the respect and admiration of an international audience. A court ordered the bows be removed in 1982. entrance to the Eaton Centre is among his works most familiar to Torontonians — and one he passionately defended, even He was awarded the Order of Canada in 1981 and upgraded to a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2007. He was 94. The National Gallery of Canada said in a statement that Snow was “a giant in the art world” and a “formidable ambassador.”

Michael Snow, the Toronto-born artist who gave this city some of its most iconic public art, has died. He was 94.

Michael Snow, one of Canada's most celebrated artists, has died at age 94. The multidisciplinary master was involved in painting, sculpture, photography and ...

In 1970, Snow had a mid-career retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario and was the first artist featured in a solo exhibition at the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In a demonstration of the links between Snow and Quebec, in 2008 the artist-run centre Séquence in Chicoutimi, inaugurated a new exhibition space, the Galerie Michael Snow. He returned to Toronto in the early 1970s, says Langford, as an established figure, multiply defined as a visual artist, a filmmaker and a musician. “His creative experiments challenged perceptions and ultimately changed how we might understand art, the world and one other.” His mother, Antoinette Levesque, was Quebecoise and ensured young Michael and his sister, Denyse, had something of a bicultural upbringing by spending considerable time in the Chicoutimi region of Quebec. The polymath, as Mayer calls Snow, saw an intimate relationship between all the genres of work he tackled. “Michael Snow was one of the most significant – if not the most significant – artists of his generation,” said Diana Nemiroff, former contemporary art curator at the National Gallery. Within the world of fine art, his most iconic works include his Walking Woman series, which explore the world of negative space using stencils and mirror-image cut-out space in works depicting walking women. His father was Gerald Bradley Snow, a veteran of the First World War, a civil engineer and surveyor. “He (Snow) describes the film as ‘a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas.’ The spine of the film is its famous zoom from a fixed camera position facing a wall with four tall sash windows. He went to court – and won – affirming the artist’s right to the integrity of his work. Nevertheless, friends say Snow remained in good spirits and demonstrated his sharp intellect until the end.

Michael Snow, the famed filmmaker and experimental artist who did 'Wavelength,' has died at 94.

Under the aegis of Jonas Mekas, Snow was able to screen his works for crowds that included artist Nam June Paik and filmmaker Shirley Clarke. He was picked to do the 1970 Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The three-hour La Région Centrale (1971) includes little more than 17 unbroken shots of the mountains in Canada. But it was his ties to the New York film world that ultimately brought him fame. He played in jazz clubs in Canada at night; during the day, he created paintings in his studio. He attended the Ontario College of Art and initially started out in the world of advertising design. Photography was often at the center of all these different bodies of work, and when he had his first U.S. Paris de judgement Le and/or State of the Arts (2003) is an image of three naked women, who are seen from behind and posed before a reproduction of a famed Paul Cézanne painting of bathers. Crouch, Leap, Land (1970), a grouping of three plates that show a nude woman enacting the three titular verbs, are hang down over the floor, so that the viewer must look up from beneath and adopt the camera’s perspective. Others have admired it as a landmark of structuralist filmmaking, which seeks to distill cinema to its most basic qualities, often with an eye to the medium’s materiality. Its footage, lensed via what appears to be one largely continuous take, was shot on different film stocks, lending the work a handmade quality; its pacing is slow and meditative. “Incapable of a callow, clumsy, schmaltzy move, he’s a real curiosity, but mostly for the forthright, decent brainpower that keeps these films on a perfect abstract path, almost always away from preciosity,” Farber wrote.

TORONTO - Interdisciplinary artist Michael Snow, known in Canada and internationally for his abstract painting, public sculptures and the experimental 1967 ...

"We lost one of our icons, for sure." The zoom continues until he's out of the camera's view, eventually finishing with a woman who enters the loft and calmly phones a man to report that she's found a body. "Now was he making new work? Not as much, but he was a busy guy flying all over the world," he said. Snow was awarded the Order of Canada in 1981 and upgraded to a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2007. "My introduction to film came that way.

He was a painter, a musician, a photographer and a sculptor. But he was best known for experimental (and often contentious) films like “Wavelength.”

(Mr. “One of little more than a dozen living inventors of film art is Michael Snow,” Mr. In 1994, a consortium of Toronto arts institutions celebrated his work with multiple gallery exhibitions and a complete film retrospective, as well as concerts, symposiums and the publication of four books, each devoted to a particular aspect of his oeuvre. In 1961, he introduced a stylized, curvaceous silhouette, which he called the Walking Woman, that would be his trademark for much of the 1960s. In an interview in 1971 with the Canadian film magazine Take Out, Mr. He made his first film, the animated short “A to Z,” in 1956 (an excerpt from it was included in “*Corpus Callosum”) and had his first solo exhibition soon after. Snow attended Upper Canada College and the Ontario College of Art, from which he graduated in 1952. “A Casing Shelved” (1970) is a movie fashioned from a single projected 35-millimeter photographic slide showing a bookcase in his studio and a 45-minute tape recording of Mr. The reason may be that his best-known film was a true cause célèbre — the most outrageous American avant-garde film after Jack Smith’s quite different “Flaming Creatures” (1963). Snow’s work was often based on the paradox of two-dimensional representation and sometimes demanded a physical or psychological shift in the viewer’s position. “My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor.” And, he added, “Sometimes they all work together.” “Wavelength” (1967), hailed by the critic Manny Farber in Artforum magazine in 1969 as “a pure, tough 45 minutes that may become the ‘Birth of a Nation’ in Underground film,” provided 20th-century cinema with a visceral metaphor for itself as temporal projection.

Canadian artist Michael Snow, a towering figure in the world of avant-garde cinema, has died at the age of ninety-four. His death was confirmed by Jack ...

Considered by many to be Canada’s most important artist, Snow is represented in the National Gallery of Canada by seventy-five works; he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981 and promoted to Companion in 2007 for his contributions to cinema. “My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor,” he told the National Gallery of Canada in 1967. “I have ideas, and the wish to attempt something; I muse about it, sometimes for a long time, and then finally ‘attempt’ it.” [ALL IMAGES](#) Concurrent with his filmmaking, Snow continued to work across various media, as exemplified by the 1974 artist’s book Cover to Cover, which can be read forward or backward, and his 1987 album The Last LP, which purported to contain field recordings of vanishing ethnic musics but in fact comprised multitracked fragments composed and performed by Snow. A student first of Upper Canada College and then the Toronto College of art, he spent his twenties working as a jazz pianist at night and painting during the day. Canadian artist Michael Snow, a towering figure in the world of avant-garde cinema, has died at the age of ninety-four.