Liz Magor: Things, not Ideas
For her first East Coast institutional solo exhibition, sculptor Liz Magor (b. 1940, Winnipeg, CA) presents a new body of work resulting from her experimentations with the material Mylar. The show has two locations: the Carpenter Center of the Visual Arts in Cambridge, from January to March, and the Renaissance Society in Chicago, over next spring.
Canadian artist Liz Magor is mostly known for her casts of familiar, everyday objects, from tree trunks to cigarettes, blankets to old clothing: replicas of things that the artist generally combines with found objects taken from the outside world. “I use the casting material a lot because it flows; it’s liquid at one point. It will flow into any shape I provide, and it will mime that shape,” the artist explained in a 2015 interview. She continued, “These are not ideas; these are things. I’m totally against ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen.”
The question posed by Magor’s art is deeply philosophical, however: what is the difference between the world and its representation? Is a sculpture the visual manifestation of an idea or just an object – a “thing” – with a texture, a color palette, and its own materiality? This quandary can be quite hard to disentangle: in Magor’s installations, the ready-mades (in most cases worn items picked up at flea markets) can barely be distinguished from the sculptural casts, turning the Platonic idea-object-copy triad into an indiscernible whole. As critic Robin Laurence puts it, “[Magor’s] sculptures consistently play reality against unreality, meaning against alternative meaning, initial appearance against later revelation.”
The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge (MA) and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago will host the first East Coast institutional solo exhibition of the Vancouver-based artist (from January 30 to March 24, 2019 in Cambridge; from April to June in Chicago). Co-curated by Dan Byers and Solveig Øvstebø, the show will feature a new body of work, commissioned by the two American institutions. The brand-new sculptures are the result of Magor’s experimentations with Mylar, a material cut and folded to create transparent commercial packaging for stuffed animals and other toys. By pushing the qualities of this material, here the artist gives shape to installations whose various elements – the Mylar pieces, the ready-made objects and other sculptural “agents” – explore the relationship between durability and deterioration, strength and weakness, power and failure.
“Liz Magor: Blow Out,” Carpenter Center of the Visual Arts, Cambridge: January 30 – March 24, 2019.
Renaissance Society, Chicago: April 27 – June 23, 2019.