When Michael Snow died last Thursday I felt compelled to amass as many of our books, records, CDs, videos and bits of ephemera of his that I could unearth in the house. This involved going through six different book shelves, three different storage spaces for records and countless archival (and non-archival) boxes where I store things like this. Subsequently I've spend the last few days trying to return the items, or shovelling snow as I've taken to calling it*.
“…I was just over 30 when we made the documentary about him. It's a summation in many ways, or an extension, of the work I was doing at the AGO in 1994-1995, organizing screenings, performances and public talks as part of The Michael Snow Project. It was a really amazing time. I can’t overstate how singular the scale of the project was – major exhibitions at the AGO and The Power Plant, four companion publications (one that I edited), Walking Woman banners designed by Bruce Mau’s studio throughout the downtown core, and complementary exhibitions and programs in various corners of the city from City Hall to the Glenn Gould Studio. All for one living artist. It’s something that we aren’t likely to ever see again."
- Jim Shedden, Manager of Publishing at the Art Gallery of Ontario
"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. His 1979 Flight Stop, a flock of fiberglass geese in flight created from many photos of a single goose, remains on view today at Toronto’s Eaton Centre, with which it is inextricably identified; other public works include The Audience, 1989, a group of over-life-size sculptures of celebrating people painted gold at Toronto’s Rogers Centre; and The Windows Suite, 2006, a series of plasma screens on a downtown Toronto hotel showing “impossible” sequences.
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. He has enjoyed retrospectives at multiple venues in Toronto and at the British Film Institute; his work was included in the reopening exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2000, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2005.
Though he worked in a broad range of media, Snow’s own source of inspiration was not external but internal. “Cross-media pollination . . . doesn’t happen to me,” he told the National Gallery of Canada in 2014. “I have ideas, and the wish to attempt something; I muse about it, sometimes for a long time, and then finally ‘attempt’ it.”"
- Artforum
"Michael Snow was born in Toronto in 1928. He attended the Ontario College of Art and initially started out in the world of advertising design. Dissatisfied with his job, he went hitchhiking in Europe and then embarked on a career as a professional musician. He played in jazz clubs in Canada at night; during the day, he created paintings in his studio.
In 1961, he and his wife, the artist Joyce Wieland, moved to New York. Early on, he showed with Poindexter Gallery, the same space that also represented abstractionist painters like Jules Olitski and Willem de Kooning. But it was his ties to the New York film world that ultimately brought him fame.
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. It wasn’t until he screened Wavelength at a festival in Belgium and won the grand prize for it that he realized the following his work had gained."
*Groan at the pun all you like, but note that the purple invite at the bottom right is for a show called Fresh Snow. See also, Weather Report.
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