ART-PRESENTATION: Liz Magor-Blowout
Liz Magor’s work finds its center in the peripheral, often replicating the overlooked trappings of daily life and re-presenting them in new contexts. Activated by an interest in the covert, these constructions blur the lines between reality, imagination, and simulation. Creating new and expanded associations, Magor simultaneously draws attention to the objects’ original intentions to satisfy our need for protection, comfort, and affirmation.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Liz Magor’s new body of work, that is on show at her solo exhibition “BLOWOUT” represents a critical juncture in artist’s practice. On Level 1 objects and architectures emerge from a darkened space, contained within newly built gallery walls. Languages of transparency and enclosure frame those works. In the Sert Gallery, on Level 3, the white cube in that space acts to amplify the modes of display and bright lighting we expect to encounter in gallery and retail spaces. While shopping in a thrift store in Berlin during her recent DAAD residency, Magor found three pairs of quizzical, deeply evocative used shoes. She brought them back to Vancouver, and they spawned the work now on view on Level 3. She also began experimenting with a clear, stiff yet flexible Mylar material which is cut, folded, and tabbed to create transparent commercial packaging for clothing, stuffed animals, and other toys. With these works, Magor has pushed the qualities and capacities of these materials—as packaging, dis-play, and even a kind of model housing. Throughout the exhibition, sculptures take advantage of the floor, ceiling, and existing architecture, and play between light and dark, and the realms of the home and store. Into these layered spaces, Magor introduces unsettling, animal/figurative sculptural “agents,” (cast in rubber from recombined stuffed animal parts) together exploring conditions of weakness and strength, agency, the play between appearances and inner lives. Liz Magor’s sculpture quietly dramatizes the relationships that develop between objects. Often playing soft against hard, she pairs care with exposure. Adhering to exacting processes of casting, fabrication, and hand-made techniques, Magor raises questions around gender roles, memory, addiction, and the changing value of the objects that come in and out of our lives. Furniture, used textiles (blankets, upholstery, clothing), accessories like gloves and stockings, and plastic and paper packaging all play important roles in her work. Rendered in confounding combinations of sculpture techniques, these soft, pliable elements comingle with liquor bottles, cigarettes, and food, forces that shape our social and domestic lives. Each artwork conjures broad social histories, and is driven by intimate, contingent relationships of power and vulnerability. While animated by a commitment to the telling detail and the specific convesations that occur between forms and textures, her works drill down into the tangled politics of time and history, and our often fugitive, subjective, and inti-mate encounters with these experiences.
Info: Curators: Dan Byers and Solveig Øvstebø, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Duration: 31/1-24/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-17:00, https://carpenter.center
