Michael Snow

Michael Snow
Michael Snow, 2007
Born	(1929-12-10) December 10, 1929 (age 87) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Education	Ontario College of Art
Known for	installation art, filmmaker, painter
Notable work	New York Eye and Ear Control, Wavelength, La Région Centrale
Movement	Structural film
Awards	Officer, Order of Canada 1981 Companion, Order of Canada 1997 Chevalier d'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France 1995 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts 2000 Honorary Doctorate, Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne 2004 Honorary Doctorate, Université du Québec à Chicoutimi 2016

Michael Snow, CC (born December 10, 1929) is a Canadian artist working in painting, sculpture, video, films, photography, holography, drawing, books and music. His best-known films are Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1971), with the former regarded as a milestone in avant-garde cinema.

Michael Snow was born in Toronto and studied at Upper Canada College and the Ontario College of Art. He had his first solo exhibition in 1957. In early 1960s Snow moved to New York with his first wife, artist Joyce Wieland, where they remained for nearly a decade. For Snow this move resulted in a proliferation of creative ideas and connections and his work increasingly gained recognition. He returned to Canada in the early 1970s "an established figure, multiply defined as a visual artist, a filmmaker, and a musician.”

His work has appeared at exhibitions across Europe, North America and South America. Snows' works were included in the shows marking the reopening of both the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2000 and the MoMA in New York in 2005. In March 2006, his works were included in the Whitney Biennial.

Snow is considered one of the most influential experimental filmmakers and is the subject of retrospectives in many countries. In his 2002 Village Voice review of *Corpus Callosum, J. Hoberman writes, “Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow's structuralist epics—Wavelength and La Région Centrale—announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum heralds the advent of the next. Whatever it is, it cannot be too highly praised.” *Corpus Calossum was screened at the Toronto, Berlin, Rotterdam, and the Los Angeles film festivals amongst others. In January 2003, Snow won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Douglas Edwards Independent Experimental Film/Video Award for *Corpus Callosum. His numerous films have premiered in major film festivals all over the world. Five of his films have premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In 2000, TIFF commissioned Snow with Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg to make short films, Preludes, for the 25th Anniversary of the festival. Wavelength has been designated and preserved as a "masterwork" by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada and was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century .