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Gargoyles in Snow's sculpture,
The Audience
(1989), gesture down
at those entering Toronto's Skydome Stadium.
mixed media pieces was that they were located all over New York (and later other places), so that peoplemostly people who hadn't planned on looking at or thinking about artwould be running into them. And, of course, film is a public arena, too. Your early films were powerful interruptions of what audiences had come to expecteven from what was then called "underground film." They remind me of the old gesture in Hollywood films of slapping people across the face to bring them out of a daze. When Pat [Pat O'Connor, MacDonald's wife] and I were driving in on the expressway the other day, our eyes were immediately drawn to the gargoyles (this is before I realized that the new work you had mentioned on the phone wasn't a film). Out of the whole panorama of the Toronto skyline we were noticing these funny things hanging out of the Skydome. Everything else is rectangles and planes, so this interruption in the city's geometry can't be ignored. Even at a considerable distance, the gargoyles confront the spectator. So, for me, this new piece seems very closely related to your early work.
Snow:
I think that's really true. The big departure in the new piece for some people, at least people who know my sculpture and gallery work, is that it's figurative. I haven't done that before, except with
The Walking Woman,
but
The Walking Woman
had a whole other kind of premise. In 1953 1 did a painting called
Colin Curd about to Play
. It was one of my first big oil paintings. Colin Curd was a flute player I had met. The