Art Metropole

Benny Nemer (b. 1973) is a Montreal-born artist and diarist.

Since 2000 his creative gestures in video, sound and text have contemplated the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into language, and the resurrection and manipulation of voices – sung, spoken or screamed. Early video work concentrated on critical mimicry of material from popular culture, with references to Madonna, American Idol, Tatu, Françoise Hardy and Kylie Minogue. Recent work focuses on re-examinations of seminal texts, films and video art from queer and art history, working with material by Audre Lorde, Colin Campbell, Rosa von Praunheim, Henri Rousseau and Harry Hay.

Nemer’s work has screened in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe and East Asia and has won prizes at the Hamburg Short Film Festival, the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest and the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (all in Germany), the Toronto Inside Out Film and Video Festival as well as first prize at the Globalica Media Arts Biennale in WrocÅ‚aw, Poland. His work is part of numerous private collections as well as the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

(from wikipedia)

Michael Snow was born in Toronto not so long ago, and lives there now – but has also lived in Montreal, Chicoutimi and New York.

He is a musician (piano and other instruments) who has performed solo as well as with various ensembles (most often with the CCMC of Toronto) in Canada, USA, Europe and Japan. Numerous recordings of his music have been released.

His films have been presented at festivals in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Korea, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom and USA, and are in the collections of several film archives, including Anthology Film Archives in New York City, the Royal Belgian Film Archives (Brussels), and the Österreichische Film Museum (Vienna).

He has been a painter and sculptor, though since 1962, much of his gallery work has been photo-based or holographic. Work in all these media is represented in private and public collections world-wide, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna), Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), and both the Musée des beaux-arts and Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal.

Since 1970 he has done video, film, slide and sound installations, and made such bookworks as Michael Snow/A Survey (1970), Cover to Cover (1975), 56 Tree Poems (1999), and BIOGRAPHIE of the Walking Woman 1961-1967 (2004), as well as magazine works for Impulse (1975), Photo-Communique (1986), and C magazine (1993).

Retrospectives of his painting, sculpture, photoworks and holography have been presented at the Hara Museum (Tokyo), of his films at the Cinémathèque Française and Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), Anthology Film Archives and Museum of Modern Art (New York) and L’Institut Lumière (Lyon) and of his work in all media simultaneously in 1994 at the Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). A retrospective of his photoworks 1962-99 called Panoramique was presented in 1999 at the Palais des Beaux Arts (Brussels), touring the following year to Centre national de la photographie (Paris), MAMCO (Geneva), and Centre pour l’image contemporaine Saint-Gervais (Geneva). Additional retrospective exhibitions have been mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Solo and group shows of his visual art works have been presented at museums and galleries in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Berlin, Bonn, Boston, Brussels, Kassel, Lima, Los Angeles, Lucerne, Lyons, Minneapolis, Montreux, Munich, New York, Ottawa, Paris, Pittsburgh, Quebec City, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Toronto and elsewhere.

Michael Snow has executed several public sculpture commissions, the best known being Flight Stop at Eaton Centre (1979) and The Audience (1988-1989)at Skydome (now Rogers Centre), both in Toronto. His installation The Windows Suite was opened in September 2006 at the Pantages Hotel and Condominium complex on Victoria Street, Toronto.

He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972) the Order of Canada (Officer, 1982; Companion, 2007), and the first Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2000) for cinema. Snow was made a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres, France (1995) and in 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne.

(from Fondation Langlois website)

Born in Poland, part French, tall, white, ugly and raised in the jungle… Tonik’s art investigates the pneumatic romance between everything and nothing at all. His work is represented by Art Metropole, Toronto and Printed Matter, New York. Tonik is looking forward to going back to Europe in the autumn of 2007.