“Material talks,” said Canadian sculptor Liz Magor, and in “The Rise and The Fall,” an exhibition of ten works spanning 2017 to 2021, it does. A panoply of small and large sculptural assemblies unfolds in three rooms: real stuffed animals (birds) and fake stuffed animals (toys). Rubber replicas of fake stuffed animals made weird (a life-size, powder blue lion with a fantastical white mane with a hollow, sooty eye socket). Real fur (rat skins) and fake fur (hairy white boots). Woolen blankets, linens, silver cloth, trinkets. A sea of flimsy transparent plastic boxes are like shimmering mausoleums for crumpled cellophane, patterned tissue paper, candy wrappers, string, gold leaf, old sweaters, torn toys: eyes and limbs and torsos and entrails of stuffing scattered about.
Magor is a regular at thrift stores, where she gleans used and familiar effects, “in a way free, empty of their primary destination and no longer the target of human interest”. She repossesses and reassesses these items, which she calls “zero” things, often putting discarded items alongside versions of their ilk that she has transmuted. For Leather palm, 2019, she cast a tightly crumpled leather glove in polymerized gypsum, placing it palm-up on a circular wooden coffee table stained with sticky rings of liquid, as if from a long-dispersed social gathering . The glove is strong but feels flexible, still carrying the shape of its wearer, as gloves so often do. A half-smoked cigarette is attached to his armband, and tufts of white ash have fallen into the palm of the glove, as if the sculpture could double as a decorative trompe-l’oeil ashtray.
“I need to transform things to better capture and understand the constitutive properties of the materials and processes that form the objects of the world,” Magor said – as if his practice could return these objects to a self-contained state, rid of our disgust, inconstant desires and capable of enacting their own affinities. Two white Yeti boots face each other on dirty yellow cardboard molded boxes in Boots, 2017. Each shoe is grabbed from behind by a stuffed animal made from a similar synthetic textile, as if mistaking the shoe for a long-lost family member or lover. In Delivery (his), 2018, a silicone rubber version of a “stuffie” (as the artist calls it) hangs from a tangled pile of colorful string, holding a garment bag emblazoned with HARRY ROSEN in his hands. I hadn’t thought of this high end men’s clothing store in Canada in years.
The gesture of embrace, of inanimate things pressing together, recurs throughout Magor’s work, akin perhaps to the artist’s own gestures of embellishment – how, as she puts it, it “elevates” the objects of its attention to suggest new ontological relations. In Perennial, 2021, an old duffel coat has seen its holes and imperfections enhanced with silver, bronze and gold embroidery. In Cap, 2020, a blue lion lies on its side on a wide skirted platform, next to a collection of open jewelry boxes in the shape of an ex-voto. But the tenderest offer is Wasted, 2021, a slender silver die cast from cardboard, the slender rim of which contains a (real) stuffed bird. A tag on his ankle reads YUCATAN, JUNE 1887. Beneath his soft brown body, a dark blue shadow, like a condolence, has been painted. If Magor’s work is about what we love and how we love it (until we don’t love it anymore), it is also about the work of art as an invested form of the gaze: one that is transferred to the viewer, who is asked to question the ways in which meaning is assigned — in life as well as in art. Even the most neglected things do not disappear when their backs are turned on us – a reality that is both ecological and ideological. This includes art objects and the humble material resurrections they offer, if one pays attention to them. How ordinary, how remarkable, how enduring.
