Michael Snow

Biography

Michael Snow is considered one of Canada's most important artists, and one of the world's leading experimental filmmakers. His wide-ranging and multidisciplinary oeuvre explores the possibilities inherent in different mediums and genres, and encompasses film and video, painting, sculpture, photography, writing, and music. Snow's practice comprises a thorough investigation into the nature of perception.

While Snow early established himself as a successful painter and musician in his native Toronto, it was his 1962 move to New York City that marked the beginning of his rise to international prominence. He entered into a long-lasting and fruitful dialogue with downtown Manhattan's artistic avant garde, exchanging ideas with figures such as Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Foreman, and developing of some of his most ambitious and influential works to date. His 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control documents his growing involvement with the burgeoning free jazz movement, and the soundtrack boasts a lineup that includes Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Sonny Murray. Snow would continue to pursue improvised music, both on his own and in ensembles such as Toronto's CCMC. The generation and reception of sound in the broader sense emerged as one of his main concerns, reflected in performance and tape works that share qualities with contemporaneous experiments by composers like Steve Reich.

At the same time, Snow made alliances within the underground film scene centered around Jonas Mekas' Filmmakers' Cinematheque, an experience that encouraged him to find ways to transfer his concerns with music and photography into the realm of the moving image. He assisted Hollis Frampton on films such as Nostalgia(1971), and it was legendary director Ken Jacobs whose loan of equipment helped Snow create his most famous and influential work, the groundbreaking 1967 film Wavelength. Wavelength, which notoriously includes a 45-minute camera zoom within a fixed frame, remains one of the most studied and admired works of structuralist filmmaking. Other of Snow's films of this period, including Back and Forth (1969) and La Région Centrale (1971) similarly explored the mechanics of filmmaking to simultaneously investigate the functional processes of cinema and of thinking itself.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Snow, responding to a growing institutional commitment to his work, experimented more with large-scale installations, including public sculptures such as Flightstop (1979) and The Audience (1988-89). In recent years, he has focused on the specific nature and potential of digital media, yielding works like the video-film *Corpus Callosum (2002). Regardless of artistic genre, Snow consistently engages in an analytical discourse on the nature of consciousness and experience, language and temporality.

Michael Snow was born in Toronto, Canada in 1929. He studied at Ontario College of Art. Among his many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Order of Canada, Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2011), the Chevalier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres, France (1995, 2011) and two Los Angeles Film Critics Awards. Snow has had solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; XXV Venice Biennale; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum, Luzern, Switzerland; List Gallery, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; MoMA PS1, NY (2009); Whitney Biennial, NY (2006); The Power Plant, Toronto; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montréal; and Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, among others. His group shows include the London, Cannes, Tokyo, Berlin, New York and Toronto film festivals; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Documenta 6, Kassel; Musée Carnavalet, Paris; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Snow has had film retrospectives at Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Osterreichisches Film Museum, Vienna; Image Forum, Tokyo; Cinémathèque Française, Paris; and Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels, among many others. He has taught at Yale University, Princeton University, Ecole Nationale de la Photographie, Arles, France; Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; and le Fresnoy, Tourcoing, France, and has received Snow has received honorary degrees from Nova Scotia College of Art And Design; University of Toronto, and Université de Paris 1, Panthéon Sorbonne, among others.

Snow lived in Toronto until his death in 2023.