Faculty Spotlight 2016 > Ross McLaren

Ross McLaren: Statement

A school of fish (mass) are converted through machine/motion into light energy. School gallery as aquarium. —Ross McLaren

Professor McLaren graduated with honors from Canada's Ontario College of Art (OCA). Currently McLaren teaches film and video courses at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and at Fordham University for the past thirty years. He has lectured extensively throughout North America, Europe and Asia and has conducted courses on film and video in Italy with Fordham University and Pratt Institute. Mr. McLaren has worked as a filmmaker, scholar, teacher, curator, critic, and community organizer. He founded and was first director of the Funnel Film Center in Toronto, an institution devoted to the production, exhibition, and distribution of film Images Festival in Toronto has recently published "An Interview with Ross McLaren" in conjunction with their 25th anniversary. His films include: Wave, Weather Building, Crash 'n' Burn: the "self-destructive document of Toronto's eponymous punk club," Dance of the Sacred Foundation Application (feat. Jack Smith), Muted Horn, Squeaky Stool, the Ann Arbor Film Festival award-winning sensation Summer Camp and Into the Garden, a digital installation.

A recipient of such prestigious grants as Canada and Ontario Arts Council awards, McLaren has shown his work worldwide. His films screened at MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the Menil Collection, the National Film Theatre in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Biennale du Paris, Documenta VI, Jyvaskyla University in Finland, Exis Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul, south Korea, and Experimenta Film in Bangalore, India. His work, which was presented in such esteemed venues as the Edinburgh, Toronto, and Oberhausen Film Festivals, is found in several permanent collections, including that of the American Federation of Arts, New York; the Arts Council of Great Britain; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Ottawa's National Film Archives; and the National Gallery of Canada.