Jill Magid seeks platforms for acting inside and outside of institutions, responding to their imposition, negotiation, and, at times, capitulation of power. For Magid, this power isn’t a remote condition to contest, but rather something to manipulate, by drawing it closer, exploiting its loopholes, engaging it in dialogue, seducing its agents, revealing its sources, infiltrating its structure, repeating its logic. She creates these exchanges with power by attaching to it on an individual scale, finding her way in personally through introduction or invitation, or more abstractly though intensive research, assuming the noncontradictory but differentiated roles of woman, artist, professional, scholar, journalist, writer, and subject.
Her engagement with systems, institutions, and power has led to Magid’s more recent work, which engages the written word and its use as an agent of control, manipulation, and distortion. Magid’s commission for MATRIX has its roots in present-day events as they intersect with governmental power. While on a research trip, Magid witnessed a mysterious shooting on the steps of the Texas State Capitol by Fausto Cardenas. Nothing is known of Cardenas’s motivations, but his gesture of shooting into the sky on the steps of the capitol, where he knew he would be immediately captured, reads symbolically as both tragic and poetic. Magid connects his action to Faust, an ultimately fruitful and complex avenue of exploration. Goethe originally wrote Faust as a “closet drama” (a kind of intimate reading that functions as a theater of the mind), and Magid’s MATRIX exhibition takes the form of a stage for its reading. Goethe’s text figures prominently in the exhibition as an ongoing sound and performance work as well as a series of silkscreens, which together form a sort of infiltration into the text and its many translations, engaging the larger themes of truth and fiction, language and translation, history and legend, gesture and performance, revelation and redaction, individual and institution.
Elizabeth Thomas
Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator
