(Toronto) Multidisciplinary artist Michael Snow, known in Canada and abroad for his abstract painting, public sculptures and experimental film wavelength 1967, at the age of 94.
The Toronto-born artist died Thursday, said Tamsen Green, senior director of the Jack Scheinman Gallery in New York, which represents Snow.
The National Gallery of Canada said in a statement that Snow was “a giant in the art world, in Canada and internationally,” and a “great ambassador.” “His legacy is an unprecedented shift in the relationship between the work of art and the viewer,” he added.
Her creative experiences challenged perceptions and ultimately changed the way we understand art, the world, and each other.
Excerpts from a press release from the National Gallery of Canada
Some of his most famous projects are public artworks, including the installation Geese Flight stop From the Toronto Eaton Centre, which was established in 1979, and The audience From the Rogers Center, a statue of a cheering fan was unveiled when the SkyDome opened in 1989.
Snow Out
Throughout her artistic career, Snow has experimented with many mediums, including film, painting, sculpture, photography, and music. However, to many moviegoers he is perhaps best known for inspiring the name Wavelengths, which set the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) experimental film program.
TIFF Managing Director Cameron Bailey has described Snow’s work in the visual arts as transformative.
“He quietly tore boundaries,” Mr. Bailey said in a statement dedicated to his contribution to cinema.
Cameron Bailey, CEO of TIFF, adds that wavelengtha remarkable 45-minute camera zoom, “remains her most powerful gift”.
Interview with Snow as part of our podcast series TIFF slicing In 2017, he highlighted his interest in art as a teenager and the unusual perspectives that little opportunity opened to him.
Snow said he started playing music in high school. Soon after, he traveled to Europe, where he embarked for part of the 1950s on “trying to find himself, looking at art, taking a stroll.” He also spent those years painting, a practice he fully embraced upon his return to Toronto, where he attended the Ontario College of Art, now known as OCAD University.
Plot
An exhibition of his work at the University of Toronto’s Hart House allowed him to meet George Dunning, a Canadian producer and director, who would go on to direct the Beatles cartoon. yellow submarine in 1968.
Dunning was light years away from this psychedelic project, but was so seduced by Snow’s early work, he told him that “Whoever made these sketches is someone who must have had an interest in cinema.”
It turns out that Snow had very little interest in him. It appears that he “very rarely” went to the movies, but was intrigued by the idea of applying his knowledge to animation and accepted a job offer from Dunning to learn how to move.
Cinema began this way. I had no particular interest in cinema and was introduced to its mechanics, the way they are, frame by frame.
Michael Snow, on a podcast from the series TIFF slicingin 2017
Snow moved to New York in the 1960s and was exposed to the experimental world of film in Manhattan.
He was to return to North to present at the Montreal Expo 1967 a series of silhouette sculptures based on his character Walking Woman, a series of projects he created throughout the 1960s.
In the same year he presented wavelengthHis 45-minute medium-length film is shot entirely inside a loft, with the camera slowly zooming in on a window frame.
wavelength He won the Grand Prix at that year’s Knokke Experimental Film Festival, exposing Snow to a new audience and encouraging him to continue his research in the field of experimental cinema.
In the years that followed, Snow did not neglect his other artistic passions.
In 1970, he participated in a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, and in 1974, was part of the Canadian Creative Music Group, an improvisational group that founded the Toronto Music Gallery.
He also continued to make short experimental films, while showing some of his other work around the world, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Snow was awarded the Order of Canada in 1981 and made a Companion in 2007.
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