SNOW, Michael (James Aleck) 1929-

PERSONAL: Born December 10, 1929 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; married Joyce Wieland (an artist and filmmaker), 1959 (died June 27, 1998); Education: Upper Canada College, Toronto, 1946-51; Ontario College of Art, Toronto, 1951-55.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o The Isaacs Gallery, 832 Yonge Street, Toronto, Ontario M4W 2H1, Canada.

CAREER: Independent artist, musician, filmmaker, and photographer, beginning 1955. Yale University, New Haven, CT, professor of advanced film, 1970; Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, visiting artist, 1970, 1974; Ontario College of Art, Toronto, instructor, 1973, 1974, 1976. Exhibitions: Works included in permanent exhibitions at National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal. Solo exhibitions include Hart House, University of Toronto, 1956; Isaacs Gallery, Toronto, 1957 and 1958; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1960 and 1962; Gallery XII, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1963; Hart House, 1963; Isaacs Gallery, 1964; Poindexter Gallery, New York, 1964, 1965 and 1968; 20/20 Gallery, London, Ontario, 1966; Isaacs Gallery, 1966; Retrospective '63-'66; Vancouver Art Gallery, 1967; Isaacs Gallery, 1969; Michael Snow: A Survey, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1970; Canadian Pavilion, Biennale, Venice, 1970; Bykert Gallery, New York, 1970; Center for Inter-American Relations, New York, 1972; Bykert Gallery, 1972; Camera Works by Michael Snow, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, 1973; Projected Images, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1974; Isaacs Gallery, 1974; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976; 7 Films et Plus Tard, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (toured France 1977-79), 1977; Michael Snow, Centre Georges Pompidou (traveled to the Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, Switzerland); Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn; Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal; and Vancouver Art Gallery, 1978-80), 1978; Isaacs Gallery, 1979; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1979; Isaacs Gallery, 1982; Snow in England, Canada House, London, Ontario, 1983; University of California, Los Angeles, 1983; Walking Woman Works 1961-67; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario (traveled to Ithaca, New York; Halifax, Nova Scotia, London, Ontario; Victoria, British Columbia; and Toronto); Isaacs Gallery, 1984, Still Living, Vu Centre de la Photographie, Quebec City, 1984; and Isaacs Gallery, 1986. Group exhibitions include The Satirical in Art, York University, Toronto, 1966; Anti-Illusion: Procedures and Materials, Whitney Museum, New York, 1969; Festival International du Film, Cannes, France, 1970; Prospect '71, Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 1971; Options and Alternatives, Yale University, 1973; Another Dimension, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (toured Canada 1977-78), 1977; Re-Visions, Whitney Museum, 1979; Photoalchemy, Robert Freidus Gallery, New York, 1982; Seeing People/Seeing Space, The Photographers' Gallery, London, 1984; and Aurora Borealis, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Montreal, 1985.

MEMBER: Canadian Centre for Marine Communications.

AWARDS, HONORS: Purchase Award, Winnipeg Exhibition, 1958; Canada Council of Arts grant, 1959; senior arts grant, 1966, 1973, 1980; Henry Street Settlement Exhibition Award, 1964; First Prize, Knokke-le-Zoute Film Festival (Belgium), 1967; Guggenheim fellowship, 1972; LL.D., Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, 1975; Order of Canada, 1981; Best Independent Experimental Film Award, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, 1983; honorary doctorate, Yale University.

WRITINGS:

(Illustrator) Place of Meeting, text by Raymond Souster, Gallery Editions (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1962.

Michael Snow: A Survey, text by P. Adams Sitney, Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1970.

Cover to Cover, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1975.

High School, [Toronto, Ontario, Canada], 1980.

Collected Writings of Michael Snow, Wilfrid Laurier University Press (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), 1994.

Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by IndependentFilmmakers, edited by Scott MacDonald, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1995.

FILMS

AtoZ, 1956.

New York Eye and Ear Control (A Walking WomanWork), 1964.

Short Shave, 1965.

Wavelength, 1967.

Standard Time, 1967.

Back and Forth, 1969.

One Second in Montreal, 1969.

Dripping Water, 1969.

Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Films, 1970.

La Region Centrale, 1970-71.

Table Top Dolly, 1972.

Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanks to DennisYoung) by Wilma Schoen, 1974.

Presents, 1980.

So Is This, 1982.

SOUND RECORDINGS:

The Artists Jazz Band, 1974.

CCMC, 5 vols., 1974-80.

Michael Snow: Music for Whistling, Piano, Microphone, and Tape Recorder, 1975.

The Artists Jazz Band: Live at the Edge, 1977.

Contributor to various publications including Film Culture, Artforum, and Cinemanews.

SIDELIGHTS: Toronto native Michael Snow is an independent artist, musician, and photographer best known for his filmmaking and his "Walking Woman" series, which he introduced in 1961. It involves a cutout figure portrayed in a series of media and in various styles.

The "Walking Woman" series inspired several other pieces, including "Four to Five," Snow's first serious photographic experiment, a year later. A montage of the "Walking Woman" cut-out, consisting of twelve rectangular photos arranged in three horizontal lines, "Four to Five" features a fourth line containing two photos hung vertically, with one horizontal photograph positioned on either side.

Much of Snow's photography and film work examines themes of representation: placement versus perception. His 1969 photographic project, "Tap," combines elements of sound, image, text, object, and line. The work emphasizes the connection between images, as well as their distinctive values.

"In several works I have created both the subject and its representation," Snow once commented.

Snow, in his celluloid work, emphasizes through art the camera's function, the relationship of image to light, the intensity of focus, and the relationship among sight, sound, and memory. One of his earliest films, New York Eye and Ear Control (A Walking Woman Work), features a jazz soundtrack and serves as an extension, through new media, of the "Walking Woman" concept.

Wavelength, perhaps his best-known film, explores the illusionary properties of the zoom lens. Describing Snow's artwork in Contemporary Artists, one writer remarked, "Snow's film Wavelength—an obsessive 45-minutes zoom across a loft space to a photograph of the sea—defined the artist's commitment to a 'new cinema of structure.'"

Another writer said of Wavelength in International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, "That set the program for his most ambitious cinematic works, several of which examine the range of possibilities inherent in a given technique."

Snow links his filmmaking and photography to his experience as a painter. His film Authorization, for example, experiments with composition, form, size, scale, and embraces abstraction.

Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanks to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, continues Snow's investigation of topics related to image and sound. According to the writer for the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, "For 285 minutes, in . . . 24 distinct sections, the film explores the human body as a source of sound.... Rameau's Nephew was the turning point in Snow's career.... [It] was also a transition insofar as Snow shifted his attention from baroque examinations of camera movement to another dimension of cinema." According to the writer, Snow's subsequent films, shot mostly in Canada, reflect older types of movie-making made popular in the 1960s and '70s.

In the film Presents, an artificial-feeling apartment set rolls back and forth on camera, complicating life for residents aiming to touch an object in the moving room. Describing the film in Art in America, Ken Johnson said, "The subject is the rickety, old-fashioned construction of 'reality.' At a certain point, the picture plane attacks the set: the camera is mounted on an invisible machine . . . which moves onto the set and begins crushing everything in its path. Thus the modernist picture plane flattens illusionism."

Another highly involved exercise, Snow's heavily abstract film, Corpus Callosum, is a five-hour-long movie, five years in the making. Nancy Princethal wrote in Art in America, "Eventually, the whole scene gets cataclysmically wobbly: the woman, in close-up, is shown crying big, plainly artificial tears that slowly work their way down her gradually broadening features and seem to contribute to the progressive distortion of her face, which . . . melts and runs down the screen."

In honor of Expo '86, the World's Fair in Vancouver, British Columbia, Snow was commissioned to create Spectral Image, holography depicting images tied to transportation, communication, and industry. The abstract work stands 929 feet tall.

Snow, who has received many awards, has published sound recordings and several books of photography, including the multi-volume Michael Snow Project. Dana Polan wrote of these books in Film Quarterly, "From these first three volumes, one can extract reiterations of many of the themes that Snow criticism has concentrated on: the conceptuality of an art that focuses on its own processes of fabrication . . . the interactions of calculated control and randomness and improvisation in modern art production . . . the responsiveness (or not) of avant-gardism to popular culture, everyday life, and the public sphere."

In 1993 the Art Gallery of Toronto presented a retrospective exhibition of Snow's multi-media work and published The Michael Snow Project. Reviewing the show for Art in America, Ken Johnson wrote, "The strategic willfulness apparent in the Walking Woman works is here directed full force at the viewer, and one understands why audiences sometimes erupted into riotous protest during early showings of Snow's films. But that ruthless quality is also the strength of the film.... Each film follows its own predetermined logic and, in the best of them, there is an awesome grandeur about the implacability with which it fulfills itself."

Snow's wife, the late Joyce Wieland, was also an accomplished artist and filmmaker.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Artists, fourth edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Cornwell, Regina, Snow Seen, PMA Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1979.

Dewdney, Christopher, and Pierre Théberge, MichaelSnow: Selected Photographic Works (exhibition catalogue), Frederick S. Wight Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), 1983.

Dompierre, Louise, Philip Monk, and Dennis Reid, The Michael Snow Project: Visual Art 1951-1993, [Toronto, Ontario, Canada], 1995.

Dompierre, Louise, Walking Woman Works: MichaelSnow 1961-67 (exhibition catalogue), [Kingston, Ontario, Canada], 1983.

Gidal, Peter, Structural Film Anthology, British Film Institute (London, England), 1976.

Hanhardt, John, and others, A History of the AmericanAvant-Garde, [New York, NY], 1976.

Honnef, Klaus, and Evelyn Weiss, Documenta 6/Band2 (exhibition catalogue), [Cologne, Germany], 1977.

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume Two: Directors, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Kubelka, Peter, and others, Une Histoire du cinéma, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne (Paris, France), 1976.

The Michael Snow Project: Music/Sound: 1948-1993, Knopf (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1995.

Shedden, Jim, editor, Presence and Absence: TheFilms of Michael Snow 1956-1991, Knopf (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Art in America, July, 1994, Ken Johnson, review of Michael Snow at the Art Gallery of Ontario, pp. 70-78; May, 2001, Nancy Princenthal, "Michael Snow at White Box," p. 173.

Film Quarterly, spring, 1996, Dana Polan, review of The Critical Writings of Michael Snow, pp. 55-57.

Independent, November 6, 2001, Phil Johnson, review of Michael Snow at Arnolfini Gallery Bristol, p. 12.

Maclean's, March 21, 1994, Pamela Young, "Snow Storm: A Sprawling Retrospective Spotlights a Prolific Creator," pp. 56-57; July 1, 2001, p. 40.

Times, September 22, 2001, Amber Cowan, "The Best Shows Nationwide: Art," p. 24.

OTHER

Moore Gallery Web site,http://www.mooregallery.com/ (April 28, 2003), biography of Snow.*