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[soft synth music]

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Liz Magor: What I like about Vancouver is the fact
that it's on the edge of the continent.

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If I look west, I know it's empty.

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♪ ♪

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I call it breathing space.

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♪ ♪

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I live on the Eastside, which is very industrial.

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Big ships come in and get loaded up
with containers.

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I like that feeling of the world coming and going.

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Vancouver is an entirely and 
completely different place

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than it was when I was a child,

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and Coal Harbour especially 
was a wild, filthy, muddy,

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cranky, beautiful place.

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Then by the time I came back to look at it
for this public art project,

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all that was erased,

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and all these places that people lived
in squatter shacks

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or lived in little crappy float houses,

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all of it was gone, so I built
this little wooden building,

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put it on 4 pilings that are 
tilted because I wanted it

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at that moment of movement.

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I wanted it to be alive.

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Then we sent it to a foundry,

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and they cast every piece separately.

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Your first view is that it's a pretty ordinary

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piece of woodwork, but if you go up to it
and you see that it's aluminum, you realize

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that it's an extraordinary piece
of foundry work.

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So that flip is in the manufacture.

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You think one thing-- "So simple, so dismissible."
Then you realize another thing.

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You think, "How remarkable."

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With "LightShed," I worked consciously
about keeping the past alive, taking an old thing

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and keeping it vivacious,

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keeping a complex tapestry of stuff in the world.

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♪ ♪

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I live not far from my studio.
I take my bike.

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The studio is my priority
over everything else.

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[soft synth music]

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I try to get here every day so that I can follow
the continuity of what happened the day before.

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Often I'm here all day, you know, 8 hours,
trying to stay focused.

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I'm seeking that place where my brain stops
spinning around and stops wanting things that

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I don't have so that I can 
follow this very faint thread

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that I'm laying down as to what
each sculpture is supposed to be.

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The objects come first, and objects flow
through systems.

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We use them, we waste them, we wear them out,
and then it comes out the other end.

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They call it the waste stream.
I'm not an animist, but I do feel the objects

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that have been in the world for a while,

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they've got all this stuff in them that
comes out.

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Gloves are interesting because they're quite
complicated copies of the anatomy.

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They're very easy to fetishize,

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and I'm not the only person 
who has fetishized a glove.

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Casting is like photography in that you
have the real, the actual.

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Then you make an impression of it,
which you call a negative.

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Then you pour into that negative some system

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of making positive, and then you have a copy
of the real.

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So if there's a trapped air there and I demold it,

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then there'd be a bubble in the thumb,
for example.

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It's my favorite part.

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I like the color.

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I like the creaminess of it.

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It feels a bit like playing with your food.

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We all love that, and, um, I'm now
so accustomed to trying to kill air that it's

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like a--it's like a game on a computer.

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This is my computer game, to kill bubbles.

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Making a mold, doing all this process to that
thing that I've picked up,

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in all the slowness of it is 
how I kind of get to know it.

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So, in fact, the slowness of this process
serves the slowness of my intellectual awareness.

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Demolding is like opening a present.

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[Gasps]
Oh, it's good. It's got a few air bubbles here.

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You know the image you're going to get,

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but it's always a surprise.

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My main talent is my ability to
pay attention.

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There are many things in the world that live
in this nether zone, this nonzone,

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this not-needed zone, and so I pay attention
to these things, and through that effort,

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I'll change their status, I'll bring--
I'll resurrect them from the dead

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and bring them up into this quite

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a high-status activity that I'm involved in
of turning them into a sculpture.

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There's a big

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process of me making it.
I want a big process of looking, too.

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I'm not sending a message.
I'm creating an experience for looking.

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Objects when they're in their heyday, they
arrive in our life with a bit of celebration.

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If you're in a really pretentious store,
they make a bit sort of theatrical event

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of wrapping up your purchase.

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They fold it, then they wrap it,

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and they put a sticker with their logo on it,

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and then they carefully lift that as though it's

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a little premature baby, and 
they put it into the box.

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Inside that box is some sweater that's been
mass-produced, but this gift,

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this offering is--

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they mimic a personal transaction
between two people who care about each other.

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[soft synth music]

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♪ ♪

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Douglas fir trees grow hundreds and hundreds
of feet tall,

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and they grow for hundreds of years, and at one point,
that was everywhere here.

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They were a big source of the wealth
of British Columbia.

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They still are.

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There's a big logging industry.

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So I made this proposal for this column.
I don't call it a tree. I call it a column.

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It's 100 feet tall, 5 feet in diameter,

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and it's made of panels that are cast.

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Vancouver today is developing very quickly,

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and it's sort of like a gold rush
for condominium building.

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Each development is supposed to have
a public art component.

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You want to find a way to make something that
is for that site but is also a good work of art.

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That's the hard part.

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[soft synth music]

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- I'm gonna try it there.

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- Do you want me to hold onto the other side?

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- No.

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- Ok.

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[Liz Magor] In 1968, I was 20 years old.

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I went for two years to New York to study design,
and I started going to galleries.

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- That looks about right.

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[ Hobbs] I would just say we put them 
all up, and then--

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- All right.

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- and then we consider--

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- Yeah.

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[Liz Magor] So there were lots of times
in galleries where I got this feeling of focus.

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It's like feeling a muscle of attention
and observation that-- so I thought art

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is--is interesting.

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Art is interesting, but I didn't quite think
I was gonna do it.

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[Hammering]

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But when I dropped out of the design school
and came back to Vancouver,

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I was hanging around with a lot of artists.

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They were all guys.

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They were all painters, guy painters,

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and so I worked alongside 
my friends, watching them.

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They were making real art.

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I was making little things.

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Then I started to focus on them more till they
became more interesting and more complex.

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- Maybe, uh, 4 inches this way towards me.

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I think that's a good place...

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[Liz Magor] They started to rival
the kind of paintings that my friends were doing.

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- I don't even remember my first exhibition here

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except that you had just opened
the gallery, right?

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- You were my--you were the first solo show.

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- Was I?

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- Yeah.

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- I mean, coming up as an artist, like, you--

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you were just wildly important to me
and my friends.

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My friends at least are abuzz that you're here.

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[sounds of traffic]

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[indistinct chatter]

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All these below-the-radar impulses that

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I'm looking for all the time, these are things
that exist in our daily life,

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and they are with us.

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We wake up with these small worries and these
small concerns.

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One of those worries or anxieties is the stuff
that you have around you.

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"Can I pay for it" is a problem,

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but once you get it, then 
there's the storage problems,

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maintenance problems, dusting.

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Maintaining the conditions that are good
for this kind of not very logical,

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not rational, uncalled for--nobody's asking me
to do this.

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I'm barely asking me to do this,

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so to maintain that over years, 
I've really tried to overlook

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the relationship between my making of something

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and its journey out to exhibition.

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I don't want images of people liking
or not liking.

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I don't want to know about it.

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[crowd clapping and cheering]

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[birds chirping]

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I would be surprised if 99% of the artists you
talk to don't say, "Death really interests me."

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[laughs]

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[Scraping]

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Part of the work of being an artist is that
you are always contemplating

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the beginning of something 
and the end of something.

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There's a whole bunch of births and deaths
every day in the studio.

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[acoustic strumming]

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Some people sort of die before they do die.

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They die while they're still alive, so you know
a question is is there life before death?

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That's really the question.

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So if I look at the different choices
you have of how to spend your life,

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it seems interesting to find a 
way where you hire yourself--

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not quite hire yourself-- where you give
yourself your own program.

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♪ ♪

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I'm doing my own assignments.

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That's my definition of art actually.

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Art isn't a material, it's not a medium,

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it's not a certain product.

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It is the choices I've been able to make.

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[soft electronic music]

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♪ ♪