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 Archive
Liz Magor’s new body of work, that is on show at her solo exhibition “BLOWOUT” represents a critical juncture in artist’s practice. 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. For more than four decades, Liz Magor’s practice has quietly dramatized the relationships that develop among objects. Drawing on materials familiar from daily life, she carefully pairs elements of tenderness and exposure, often playing soft against hard, weak against strong, hand-made against mass-produced. Each artwork conjures broad social histories and is driven by intimate, contingent dynamics of power, desire, and vulnerability. Manipulating found objects much in the way an author gathers fragments of stories, the Canadian artist brings them together into a newly commissioned body of work that she describes as “a collection of tiny intense narratives”. 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. In “BLOWOUT” she uses Mylar to create clear plastic support forms recalling commercial packaging for a number of sculptural “agents”, stuffed toys that she alters in various ways. In another installation, thirty pairs of secondhand shoes line a low structure, each displayed within its own box amidst elaborate embellishments. Magor uses sculptural techniques like casting, containing, cutting, and reattaching to create these hybrids, which she arranges into sprawling vignettes. The artist is interested in how the objects might express or conceal conflicted aspirations and emotions through their own physical vocabularies: they are at once active, awkward, humorous, pathetic, and joyful. As designed products, the original items have been influenced by trends in fashion, which Magor identifies as a powerful engine for reproducing and reinforcing specific aesthetic ideals.
Info: Curators: Dan Byers and Solveig Øvstebø, The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall, 4th floor, Chicago, Duration: 27/4-23/6/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-17:00, http://renaissancesociety.org
