Ghost of the Pale Horse

Max Snow: Ghost of the Pale Horse

The New York Artist Captures the Spirit of Long Island for a Fourth of July Exhibition

“It’s an assemblage of vignettes about metamorphosis, the journey of the spirit from one realm to the next,” explains photographer Max Snow about his first film, made in collaboration with Montauk’s bohemian haven, The Surf Lodge. Snow tapped America’s master composer Philip Glass—an old friend—for an eerie minimalist soundtrack to this meditation on one of the East Coast’s most arresting spots. The New York-based artist regularly plunders mythology to inform his imagery, and here sought to highlight the “original soul of the place” by eliminating any man-made items from the footage, aside from clothes, and cast classic-looking beauty Loulou Robert as his modern siren Hero to an unseen and lost Leander. “She has duende,something that cannot be put into words,” Snow says of his French protagonist who was the muse of Dutch duo Inez & Vinoodh in Vmagazine’s March 2012 issue. The video arose from his summer-long artist residency and collaboration with the beach-side hotspot, resulting in a capsule collection of men’s clothing and an exhibition to be mounted over Independence Day weekend. Snow is married to stylist-of-the-moment Vanessa Traina and has been building his resumé over the past few years, with exhibitions at Colette in Paris and Marina Gisich in St. Petersburg. How will he celebrate today’s federal holiday? On the South Fork, he says, “blowing shit up,” as per his annual tradition.

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