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Carte grise À michael snow
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The creator of a rich and multi-faceted body of work, Michael Snow cultivates a delightful sense of paradox. His Carte Grise has its source in Triage, which he created with Carl Brown. Two completely autonomous films are projected side by side on a screen, creating a sort of exquisite corpse. Snow’s side, following an extremely rigorous encyclopaedic structure, presents “24 images/second of Everything”: invertebrates, mushrooms, pages from a telephone book, colour charts, meteorological phenomena, etc. On his side, and in an almost exactly opposite manner, Brown develops infinite variations in a single sequence with infinite variations. These two radically different or even antagonistic approaches to visual language raise, each in its own way, questions about perception, knowledge and the role of the viewer who, in the end, adds his or her imagination and intelligence to those of the artists to create the work and give it meaning. The original version of Triage will be projected at the Goethe Institute on April 25 while the work Triage, April 22, 2004, a video created at the time of the film’s premiere, will be shown in the gallery. The exhibition component of this Carte Grise offers the opportunity to discover Carl Brown’s photography. Describing himself as an alchemist, Brown treats the film not as a mere medium but as a significant part of the work, combining the materiality of traditional filmic and photographic procedures with the specificity and virtual aspect of digital techniques. In his work, the means of expression is of considerable importance in the aesthetic, reflexive and even documentary value of the image. The third part of this event is a series of three evening screenings of the films of Michael Snow and Carl Brown at the Goethe Institute. SCREENINGS
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Born not so long ago in Toronto where he now lives, Michael Snow has worked in many mediums : painting, sculpture, video, film, photography, music. Major retrospectives of his works have been presented in Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. His works are part of numerous collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), MOMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris) as well as Montreal’s Musée des beaux-arts and Musée d’art contemporain. He has received many awards, among which the Order of Canada (1982) and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2000). In 2004, he received an honorary doctorate from the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Carl Brown is a filmmaker, photographer and alchemist. He was born in Toronto in 1959. He studied philosophy and psychology for two years at the University of Toronto and then graduated in 1982 from the Film Studies Department at Sheridan College. A unique figure in Canadian experimental cinema, he has made nineteen films, presented in numerous festivals in the Americas, Europe and Asia and has worked on a few projects in collaboration with Michael Snow. In 2006, an exhibition of his photographs was held at the Dazibao thanks the artists for their generous collaboration and its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec.
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Once a year, Carte Grise provides an opportunity to discover, through an exhibition and publication, one artist’s particular view on contemporary photography. This time, Michael Snow has chosen to organize the event around his long-standing collaboration with the experimental filmmaker and photographer Carl Brown.