Michael Snow Obituary, Death – Michael Snow, 95, a Canadian artist, musician and filmmaker has died on January 05, 2023. Michael experimented with a variety of media, including film, installation, sculpture, photography, and music. His most well-known films are Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1971), with the former considered a foundational achievement in avant-garde cinema. Michael Snow was born in Toronto on December 10, 1928, and attended Upper Canada College and the Ontario College of Art.
In 1957, he gave his debut solo performance. Snow and his wife, the artist Joyce Wieland, relocated to New York in the early 1960s and stayed for almost a decade. As a result of this shift, Snow’s creative ideas and relationships flourished, and his work earned popularity. In the early 1970s, he returned to Canada as “an established presence, multiple identified as a visual artist, a filmmaker, and a musician.” His art has been shown in galleries in Europe, North America, and South America. Snows’ art was featured in shows commemorating the reopening of the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2000 and the MoMA in New York in 2005.
His sculptures were on display at the Whitney Biennial in March 2006. Snow is largely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most significant experimental filmmakers. Annette Michelson writes about Snow, his 1967 film Wavelength, and his films in general, putting viewers in a position to “more fully understand the particular impact of Snow’s filmic work from 1967 on, to discern the reasons for the large consensus given” to Wavelength when it was awarded the Grand Prize at the 1967 Experimental Film Festival EXPRMNTL 4 in Knokke, Belgium, and that “Wavelength, [appears] as a “[f]ew. Snow, a former professional jazz musician, has a long history of interest in improvisational music, as evidenced by the soundtrack of his film New York Eye and Ear Control. As a pianist, he has performed alone and with other performers in North America, Europe, and Japan.
Snow has published over a half-dozen CDs since the mid-1970s and plays frequently in Canada and overseas, typically with the improvised music ensemble CCMC. Snow released The Last LP (Art Metropole) in 1987, claiming it was a documentary recording of the dying gasps of ethnic musical cultures from around the world, including Tibet, Syria, India, China, Brazil, Finland, and others, but it was actually a series of multi-tracked recordings of Snow himself, who revealed the joke only in a single column of text printed backwards on the disc’s gatefold jacket. wa One song, which appears to be about a coming-of-age celebration in Niger, is a parody of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know?”
Snow played Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music at the Whitney Museum of American Art on May 27, 1969, alongside Richard Serra, James Tenney, and Bruce Nauman. The Michael Snow Project, a multi-venue exhibition of Snow’s works that ran for many months in Toronto in 1993, was presented at a variety of public locations, including the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Power Plant. Alfred A. Knopf Canada published four books about his works at the same time. Snow’s work has been exhibited in galleries and theaters all over the world, including a retrospective at the British Film Institute in London, where his celluloid works were presented in theaters and his digital works were displayed in galleries (The BFI Gallery). Elisabetta Fabrizi and Chris Meigh-Andrew co-curated the “Yes Snow Show” initiative in 2009.
In 1981, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada and was raised to Companion in 2007 “for his contributions to international visual arts as one of Canada’s best transdisciplinary contemporary artists”. For his contributions to cinema, he received the first Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2000. In 2004, he was conferred an honorary doctorate by the Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne. Pablo Picasso was the most recent recipient of this honor. As part of the Vide/Art/Electronic Festival in 2006, Lima’s Museum of Art (MALI) featured a selective retrospective exhibition as well as a screening of his films.