[soft synth music]
Liz Magor: What I like about Vancouver is the fact that it's on the edge of the continent.
If I look west, I know it's empty.
♪ ♪
I call it breathing space.
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I live on the Eastside, which is very industrial.
Big ships come in and get loaded up with containers.
I like that feeling of the world coming and going.
Vancouver is an entirely and completely different place
than it was when I was a child,
and Coal Harbour especially was a wild, filthy, muddy,
cranky, beautiful place.
Then by the time I came back to look at it for this public art project,
all that was erased,
and all these places that people lived in squatter shacks
or lived in little crappy float houses,
all of it was gone, so I built this little wooden building,
put it on 4 pilings that are tilted because I wanted it
at that moment of movement.
I wanted it to be alive.
Then we sent it to a foundry,
and they cast every piece separately.
Your first view is that it's a pretty ordinary
piece of woodwork, but if you go up to it and you see that it's aluminum, you realize
that it's an extraordinary piece of foundry work.
So that flip is in the manufacture.
You think one thing-- "So simple, so dismissible." Then you realize another thing.
You think, "How remarkable."
With "LightShed," I worked consciously about keeping the past alive, taking an old thing
and keeping it vivacious,
keeping a complex tapestry of stuff in the world.
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I live not far from my studio. I take my bike.
The studio is my priority over everything else.
[soft synth music]
I try to get here every day so that I can follow the continuity of what happened the day before.
Often I'm here all day, you know, 8 hours, trying to stay focused.
I'm seeking that place where my brain stops spinning around and stops wanting things that
I don't have so that I can follow this very faint thread
that I'm laying down as to what each sculpture is supposed to be.
The objects come first, and objects flow through systems.
We use them, we waste them, we wear them out, and then it comes out the other end.
They call it the waste stream. I'm not an animist, but I do feel the objects
that have been in the world for a while,
they've got all this stuff in them that comes out.
Gloves are interesting because they're quite complicated copies of the anatomy.
They're very easy to fetishize,
and I'm not the only person who has fetishized a glove.
Casting is like photography in that you have the real, the actual.
Then you make an impression of it, which you call a negative.
Then you pour into that negative some system
of making positive, and then you have a copy of the real.
So if there's a trapped air there and I demold it,
then there'd be a bubble in the thumb, for example.
It's my favorite part.
I like the color.
I like the creaminess of it.
It feels a bit like playing with your food.
We all love that, and, um, I'm now so accustomed to trying to kill air that it's
like a--it's like a game on a computer.
This is my computer game, to kill bubbles.
Making a mold, doing all this process to that thing that I've picked up,
in all the slowness of it is how I kind of get to know it.
So, in fact, the slowness of this process serves the slowness of my intellectual awareness.
Demolding is like opening a present.
[Gasps] Oh, it's good. It's got a few air bubbles here.
You know the image you're going to get,
but it's always a surprise.
My main talent is my ability to pay attention.
There are many things in the world that live in this nether zone, this nonzone,
this not-needed zone, and so I pay attention to these things, and through that effort,
I'll change their status, I'll bring-- I'll resurrect them from the dead
and bring them up into this quite
a high-status activity that I'm involved in of turning them into a sculpture.
There's a big
process of me making it. I want a big process of looking, too.
I'm not sending a message. I'm creating an experience for looking.
Objects when they're in their heyday, they arrive in our life with a bit of celebration.
If you're in a really pretentious store, they make a bit sort of theatrical event
of wrapping up your purchase.
They fold it, then they wrap it,
and they put a sticker with their logo on it,
and then they carefully lift that as though it's
a little premature baby, and they put it into the box.
Inside that box is some sweater that's been mass-produced, but this gift,
this offering is--
they mimic a personal transaction between two people who care about each other.
[soft synth music]
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Douglas fir trees grow hundreds and hundreds of feet tall,
and they grow for hundreds of years, and at one point, that was everywhere here.
They were a big source of the wealth of British Columbia.
They still are.
There's a big logging industry.
So I made this proposal for this column. I don't call it a tree. I call it a column.
It's 100 feet tall, 5 feet in diameter,
and it's made of panels that are cast.
Vancouver today is developing very quickly,
and it's sort of like a gold rush for condominium building.
Each development is supposed to have a public art component.
You want to find a way to make something that is for that site but is also a good work of art.
That's the hard part.
[soft synth music]
- I'm gonna try it there.
- Do you want me to hold onto the other side?
- No.
- Ok.
[Liz Magor] In 1968, I was 20 years old.
I went for two years to New York to study design, and I started going to galleries.
- That looks about right.
[ Hobbs] I would just say we put them all up, and then--
- All right.
- and then we consider--
- Yeah.
[Liz Magor] So there were lots of times in galleries where I got this feeling of focus.
It's like feeling a muscle of attention and observation that-- so I thought art
is--is interesting.
Art is interesting, but I didn't quite think I was gonna do it.
[Hammering]
But when I dropped out of the design school and came back to Vancouver,
I was hanging around with a lot of artists.
They were all guys.
They were all painters, guy painters,
and so I worked alongside my friends, watching them.
They were making real art.
I was making little things.
Then I started to focus on them more till they became more interesting and more complex.
- Maybe, uh, 4 inches this way towards me.
I think that's a good place...
[Liz Magor] They started to rival the kind of paintings that my friends were doing.
- I don't even remember my first exhibition here
except that you had just opened the gallery, right?
- You were my--you were the first solo show.
- Was I?
- Yeah.
- I mean, coming up as an artist, like, you--
you were just wildly important to me and my friends.
My friends at least are abuzz that you're here.
[sounds of traffic]
[indistinct chatter]
All these below-the-radar impulses that
I'm looking for all the time, these are things that exist in our daily life,
and they are with us.
We wake up with these small worries and these small concerns.
One of those worries or anxieties is the stuff that you have around you.
"Can I pay for it" is a problem,
but once you get it, then there's the storage problems,
maintenance problems, dusting.
Maintaining the conditions that are good for this kind of not very logical,
not rational, uncalled for--nobody's asking me to do this.
I'm barely asking me to do this,
so to maintain that over years, I've really tried to overlook
the relationship between my making of something
and its journey out to exhibition.
I don't want images of people liking or not liking.
I don't want to know about it.
[crowd clapping and cheering]
[birds chirping]
I would be surprised if 99% of the artists you talk to don't say, "Death really interests me."
[laughs]
[Scraping]
Part of the work of being an artist is that you are always contemplating
the beginning of something and the end of something.
There's a whole bunch of births and deaths every day in the studio.
[acoustic strumming]
Some people sort of die before they do die.
They die while they're still alive, so you know a question is is there life before death?
That's really the question.
So if I look at the different choices you have of how to spend your life,
it seems interesting to find a way where you hire yourself--
not quite hire yourself-- where you give yourself your own program.
♪ ♪
I'm doing my own assignments.
That's my definition of art actually.
Art isn't a material, it's not a medium,
it's not a certain product.
It is the choices I've been able to make.
[soft electronic music]
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