Visual artist Liz Magor collects writing from the past 40 years in Subject to Change
New book offers rare insight into her singular studio process, and the way that writing helps her make sense of her work
Photo by Kelly Lycan
IN HER NEW collection of 40 years’ worth of essays, conversations, and notes, leading Vancouver visual artist Liz Magor says that she has often used writing to “get a grip on how my work was operating.”
“If I use language for posing questions,” she says in the recently released Subject to Change: Writings and Interviews (Concordia University Press, as part of its Text/Context series), “the sculpture has a chance to continue its search for what I don’t yet know.”
Magor’s major career highlights include winning the Audain Art Prize. the Governor-General’s Award for Visual Art, and France’s Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; showing in the Venice Biennale; and being collected in major museums and galleries across the country. (She’s also been a longtime, respected instructor at Emily Carr University.) Her new book offers rare insight into her unique studio process, and the way that writing grows out of, and helps her make sense of, her work.
“When I’m in the studio I don’t have a plan, and I don’t have an idea, and I don’t have a proposal or artist statement—I just come to the studio and use it as a sort of absolute beginning place,” she explains, speaking to Stir from her Vancouver studio earlier this fall before the book hit presses. “It might be an image or a material…so it just sort of starts with my interests, and inevitably it turns into something, because I come in every day and I work every day. Eventually it’s done, and that’s when I start to think about it—I look back at it or analyze it or try to figure out what the trajectory was.
“I use the writing to sort of track what happened so that I can inform myself, so I can start again from scratch,” she continues. “So in a way, I’m building up an intuitive reservoir through the writing.”
Often, Magor relates, the writing will come to her when she wakes in the night; without distractions, she’ll start unravelling what she’s done in her studio. “Thinking is sort of a nuisance—you want to avoid thinking at all times!” she says wryly. “So I have to be forced to think, so writing forces me to think and insomnia forces me to write.”
Though it’s no traditional catalogue or retrospective, the book does reflect the different stages of Winnipeg-born, Prince Rupert-raised Magor’s career, from early sculptural and installation experiments in Vancouver in the 1970s to a sojourn to Toronto in the 1980s, then a return to the West Coast in 1993.
Liz Magor, Alberta/Quebec (2013), wool, fabric, thread, dye, plastic, metal and wood, 133.5 x 54 x 8 cm. Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery
Through ample photos accompanying each think piece or conversation, art fans who have followed the pioneering artist are able to trace the works she’s created through the years. There are the real, old jars of preserves, lining a wooden shelf, in 1976’s Time and Mrs. Tiber (Magor ruminates here on the complex joining of her title subject’s “desire to extend the life of a fruit for the season, to my desire to hold it for a lifetime, to the museum’s desire to maintain it in perpetuity”). There are the neatly organized, lead-cast everyday objects—light bulbs, matches, fishing weights, bread—that measured a woman’s weight at different times in her life. There are allusions to her photography (of Civil-War re-enactors, fresh-faced students, and hippie back-to-the-land-ers) and to large-scale installations—such as 1996’s Messenger, a full-sized one-room cabin outfitted for survival (“Ammunition boxes share storage space with basic supplies such as flour and sugar,” she writes) with a curious plaster-cast dog lying on its bed. Across all the complex works, themes emerge: clothing and shelter; the natural and the artificial; identity, consumption, and history.
Some of the more recent passages explore what the artist calls “Zero Things”—objects she reveals can have a rich life of their own, away from their human owners. Magor describes those items in the book as “full and empty at the same time. Full, thanks to the relentless production of ‘meaning’ within a culture, and empty due to the persistent failure of things to hold on to those intentions.”
“Zero Things have a being that is independent of a human story, and I want that identity of that thing to be known and revealed and added to the human story,” she tells Stir. “I once did a whole project of the crappiest, crappiest shoes that were ever made. I got them at Value Village for $5.99 and I took them back to the studio and put them in boxes to make them look like they were from Gravity Pope—I put them in these beautiful boxes and kind of treated them like they were handcrafted, special things. Suddenly they gained this allure that I kind of provided to them but which they all aspired to: to be good shoes. No pair of shoes comes into the world saying, ‘I want to be the shittiest pair of shoes ever.’ They’re also trying to attract our attention through their cuteness or whatever, but they fail because they haven’t been given a fair chance; their soles are made out of plastic or just put together with glue or something.”
Subject to Change also includes her written reflections around her work with old blankets, collected from thrift stores and reimagined—sometimes drycleaned and sewn and embroidered to resemble abstract, colour-field paintings.
Messenger (detail), 1996-2002, Wood, plaster, textile, found objects, Vancouver Art Gallery, ©Liz Magor. Photo by Vancouver Art Gallery, Trevor Mills
“It’s me ruminating on why I started dragging the wool blankets home from Value Village,” she says of the piece in Subject to Change. “I probably started [collecting them] for the dogs, and then I started thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t even want the dogs to lie on this—there’s something expressive here’ or ‘There’s something I want to know about the blanket.’ And then there’s this kind of longevity to the blankets.
“So I became very engaged in just letting these blankets be and making a new context for them,” she continues. “A lot of what I have to work on is to offset the nostalgia or sentimentality, if I’m working with Zero Things. Because one way to bring them to life is to sentimentalize them or say ‘They remind me of my grandmother’s house,’ and I don’t want to do that: to assign them a human narrative.
“It’s like I want to think about the blanket as it’s being born, woven strand by strand,” she explains. “These tiny threads go back and forth until gradually you have a sheet of material that is big enough to cover two bodies in a bed. And so I kind of want that material life of the blanket to be what I’m trying to reveal, as opposed to the social life of the blanket as being a Mennonite blanket or a Hudson’s Bay blanket or something like that.”
The final, bitingly funny piece in the publication finds the artist observing one of her other found-object installations employed in a Spring/Summer 2020 fashion runway show: approximately 80 clear mylar boxes holding dismembered and flayed textile toys–“any damage that can befall a stuffie has occurred”, as she writes. The short piece muses on the fact that her work has become a prop—“Not what I was aiming for.”
Looking back over all of it to put together the book, Magor was surprised to find such a strong connection between her works over the decades. Though the pieces that inspired the questions in her writing employed materials as far-flung as preserve jars, discarded blankets, wrecked stuffed animals, and silver-gelatin prints, there was a common thread.
“The thing that struck me was that my reason for being an artist or my goals or ideas about what I wanted to address were the same,” she reflects. “I didn’t know that I had been consistent in the themes or ideas I had been concerned with.”
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