Episode #244: 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.

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 or scavenged from the limbo of thrift stores. By resurrecting uncared for items and moments from the recent past, Magor preserves faint whispers of life in artworks that function as fossils do—exacting copies of existence.

Learn more about the artist at:
http://www.art21.org/artists/liz-magor

CREDITS: Producer: Ian Forster & Wesley Miller. Consulting Producer: Nick Ravich. Interview: Pamela Mason Wagner. Editor: Morgan Riles. Camera: Greg Bartels. Sound: Jeff Carter. Artwork Courtesy: Liz Magor. Special Thanks: Peep-Hole & Contemporary Art Gallery.

Art21 "Exclusive" is supported, in part, by the Art21 Contemporary Council.