Liz Magor

“I started making things as a child simply as a way to make up for the deficiency of what was offered. I found most things around me to be practical, unbeautiful and meaningless. I needed things to be emotionally charged and personal, almost equivalent to me in terms of subjectivity (...) From one point of view, making art is a way of testing the positions one might take relative to the world, and the people and things found in the world. The materials, the images, the operations, the forms of address, they all come from an inventory of possibilities and I’m conscious of my choices. By now I have an enhanced ability to make things, but a diminished need for those things to speak symbolically or profoundly. Now I’m spending hours making the things I used to find unbeautiful and meaningless–a pile of towels, a stack of trays, a discarded jacket, a cardboard box–and setting them up in relationship to found things. My interest is how the studio part affects the found part. Through some mysterious operation the found things become really alive when set against the sculptural representation of something ordinary.” “A conversation with Liz Magor”, Liz Magor, ed. MAC Montréal, Migros Museum & Kunstverein im Hamburg, 2016