Toronto-born Michael Snow, ‘a giant in the art world,’ dead at 94

Toronto-born filmmaker and artist Michael Snow, known around the world for his paintings, sculptures and the experimental short film “Wavelength,” which was shot over the course of a week in 1966, has died. He was 94.

The death was confirmed by New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery, which represented Snow. He died Thursday, according to Senior Director Tamsen Greene.

Tributes from the art world began pouring in after his passing was made public.

In a statement, the Art Gallery of Ontario said that everyone was “very sad” about the news.

“Michael Snow was a great artist and person — a legendary Toronto artist whose highly acclaimed and influential career spans all media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, film, video projection, sound art, bookmaking and experimental jazz,” the statement reads.

The National Gallery of Canada said in a statement that Snow was “a giant in the art world” and a “formidable ambassador.”

They also said his work transformed how viewers appreciated artwork, challenged perceptions and changed their understanding of art.

Snow experimented across many decades with a variety of media including film, paintings, sculptures, photography and music.

A biography on the Art Canada Institute website describes Snow as a self-taught musician who played piano in jazz bands. In 1974, he was a part of the Canadian Creative Music Collective, an improvisation group that founded Toronto’s Music Gallery.

One of Snow’s first notable works was called “Four to Five,” and involved taking his life-size silhouette called Walking Woman and photographed it amongst pedestrians in various spots in Toronto in the early sixties, “where it alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) functions as a chunk of negative or positive space,” as Artforum put it.

Snow lived for many years in New York, where he released “Wavelength.” Noted for its 45-minute camera zoom, it is regarded as groundbreaking experimental cinema.

Another aspect of his career was public art, with works such as the Toronto Eaton Centre’s geese installation “Flight Stop,” created in 1979, and the Rogers Centre’s “The Audience” a sculpture of excited fans.

The flock of dozens of fibreglass geese flying high above the Queen St. entrance to the Eaton Centre is among his works most familiar to Torontonians — and one he passionately defended, even once taking the mall to court, arguing they were damaging his reputation.

Shortly after commissioning the work for $77,000, the Eaton Centre tied festive red bows around their necks in celebration of “the wonder” of Christmas, as one advertisement put it.

Unimpressed, Snow’s lawyer compared the move to “putting a wristwatch on Michelangelo’s David,” arguing that the Copyright Act gave Snow the rights to his work, even if the mall owned it. A court ordered the bows be removed in 1982.

“Above all, Snow is a serious artist,” The Star’s Christoper Hume wrote at the time.

“His rigorously intellectual works have brought him the respect and admiration of an international audience. New Yorkers consider his films the last word, Parisians find him tres profond; only in Canada do they censor his films and beribbon his sculptures.”

He was awarded the Order of Canada in 1981 and upgraded to a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2007.

With files from The Canadian Press

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