Liz Magor: Blowout

In 2019, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University co-organized an exhibition of a newly commissioned body of work by the Canadian artist Liz Magor. The accompanying publication, Liz Magor: BLOWOUT, is the artist's first US catalog in ten years, and it features thorough photographic documentation of the new work, commissioned texts by Mitch Speed and Sheila Heti, and a conversation between the artist and curators Dan Byers and Solveig vsteb . For more than four decades, Magor's practice has quietly dramatized the relationships that develop among objects, and she describes this body of work as a collection of tiny and intense narratives. Each written contribution responds in its own way to Magor's new installations, which feature altered stuffed toys, bits of paper, and rat skins--sculptural agents, in the artist's words--suspended in transparent Mylar box forms, and thirty-two pairs of secondhand shoes, each displayed within its own box amidst elaborate embellishments.