Everyone Should Have a Studio
Liz Magor
While working on a cast sculpture of a paper bag, Liz Magor describes her Vancouver studio as a place for pleasure as well as productivity. “If I’m not here,” says the artist, “I want to be here and I want to work.”
Magor maintains a quiet, elemental studio so that she is able to seek out “below the radar” systems embedded in the everyday objects and materials that inspire her. “It’s a way to keep myself on a single focus—on a single track—and there’s something pleasurable about that.” As she reflects on the potential health benefits of maintaining a studio, Magor is shown installing an earlier cast bag sculpture, Mademoiselle Raymonde (2014), at Peep-Hole in Milan, Italy.
Featured artists
About the artists
Liz Magor makes uncannily realistic casts of humble objects—garments, cardboard boxes, ashtrays—that speak to mortality and local histories. Magor’s delicate copies are often combined with found ephemera, whether tiny vices—such as cigarettes, candy, and alcohol—animals in the form of taxidermied birds and stuffed toy dogs, or small mementos given to her by friends. Social narratives of how things in the world are created, enter our lives, and depart to the junk heap as part of a vast human waste stream are folded together with personal anxieties and small worries, such as the desire to afford nice things, to mend what’s broken, and to preserve order against inevitable entropy.
Dan Adler and Lesley Johnstone share the curatorial process behind “Liz Magor: Habitude,” the artist’s largest survey to date at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal.
