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painting shows this person and a group of people, faces. It's rather Paul Klee-ish. The focus of the painting is the relationship between the audience and the artist or the audience and the work.
There's also some early sculpture, which people would generally call abstract, that includes the spectators. There's
Scope
[1967], which was originally shown in New York in the late sixties. Actually, it's one of a series of sculptures I've continued. They're framers and directors of the spectator's attention.
Scope
is kind of a giant periscope on its side, an illusory straight ahead, made by a couple of right angles. If you look in one end, you see this tunnel andif someone else is looking into the other endanother person at the end of the tunnel. There's also
De La,
a video installation work (owned by the National Gallery of Canada) which uses the apparatus I made to film
La Région Centrale
. The spectators are part of the image.
Another connectionthough I didn't think about it at the timeis in
Seated Figures,
the film I made during the same period when I was working on the Skydome piece: the sound is the sound of an audience. The connection is obvious now, but when I made the soundtrack for the film, I was just trying to figure out what kind of sound was going to do the best job in connection with the imagery. So, yes, the Skydome piece is in some ways a continuation of my earlier work.
MacDonald:
What originally drew you to film?
Snow:
Confusion. I decided to go to art school from high school because I was given the art prize, which surprised me. I knew I was sort of interested in art, but I was still trying to figure out what to do, so I went to the Ontario College of Art to study design. I started to paint, more or less on my own. A teacher, John Martin, the head of that department, was very, very helpful (he's dead now). He suggested what books to read and made comments on my work. He was fantastic. He suggested that I put a couple of paintings in a juried show, put on by a group called the Ontario Society of Artists. This was a big group show that happened every year, for members and other people. I was still a student, but my two paintings got accepted. It was a big deal because a student had never been in the show. It was very encouraging.
I had already started to play music. During high school I had met a bunch of ne'er-do-wells and started to play jazz. It was a fantastic part of my life. At school I had been rebelling (mildly) against everything. But when I found music, I really found something. I started to play a lot, and a band formed, and by the time I went to O.C.A., I was playing occasional jobs. So I was simultaneously getting into music and into painting and sculpture, mostly painting. I was influenced by a lot of people: Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, Klee. I liked Klee very much.
When I got out of O.C.A., I found a job in an advertising firm that