Michael Snow (b: 1928) remains a giant, renowned in film, sound, sculpture, photography and painting. He may be best known by the general public for the spectators sculpture on the side of the Rogers Centre and the Canada geese in flight at the Eaton Centre. But he has always been a whirlwind, constantly advancing and exploring all facets of his inventive work.
He opens a centrepiece exhibition at the 2017 Contact Photography Festival, with video installations produced in Newfoundland where he spends summers. (See more on Snow on previous Art Junkie posts here and here.)
The four works for Newfoundlandings are “unified by the omnipresence of the wind,” the festival says. “They illustrate a number of Snow’s enduring preoccupations: sound, duration, and wordplay, as well as the nature of the frame, the camera, and the photographic act itself.”
In Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids), for example, a static camera frames an open window where a handmade curtain billows and puckers with the rise and fall of the wind.
Snow once described himself as “not a professional. My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor … sometimes they all work together.”
Michael Snow at the National Gallery of Canada, here.
Art Institute of Canada online e-book, here.
Two previous Canadian Art Junkie posts, here and here.
A Toronto Life profile, here.
This is #17 in the series 150 Artists.
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I’m actually not sure. The toe on the Timothy Eaton statue maybe?
I always wondered who did the geese at the Eaton Center.
Now that Eaton’s is gone they (the geese) are 1 of the last 2 awesome presences there. I’m sure you know the other historic entity.