Double Cabinet (blue), 2001
polymerised gypsum, cans of beers 23,5 x 68,58 x 43,18 cm
installation view No Fear, No Shame, No Confusion, by Triangle France © Photo : AURELIEN MOLE
private collection, Vancouver

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Fairytales have the same interest in finding the animus or the energy in the object, in the material world. I’m doing it not from a religious or ritualistic or a witchy point of view. I’m doing it as a person who has a psychology that’s operating all the time to project and receive meaning from the material world. That’s a business that goes on all day. Like a bat using the walls, using the sonar to sound against the wall to find out how far the wall is. I think a similar process goes on with the objects in a life. That you’re testing your feelings against these things: I like this thing! I hate this thing! I want this thing! This is a beautiful thing. It’s all about me, really. It’s not about that thing. I’m using those things. So what I’m interested in is to stop using things. So when I turn them into sculpture I am stopping their usefulness. It’s no longer a jacket. And when it becomes art, it then becomes free of that sort of endless process of using objects for my ego or for my purposes. I want them to have this integrity of their own where they are recognized as having qualities that are independent of me. – LIZ MAGOR about Double Cabinet (2001) via 

The tension or play between the cast objects and the actual ones in Magor’s small pieces involves a complex relationship between history and memory. One of the elements in the small sculpture Still Alive (2016) is a very used, actual deerskin jacket, such as what might have been worn by the late 1960s, a hippy-era “back-to-the-landers” item in her photo series Field Work (1989). The jacket retains its own history, its marks and scars, and its strange, embroidered, leather-fringed materiality forfeits nothing. – E.C WOODLEY, Liz Magor Waits, But Not For You, August 17, 2016.

Habitude by LIZ MAGOR was presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and closed on September 5th. In 2017 MAGOR‘s work will presented at the Migros-Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich and at the Kunstverein in Hamburg.

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