Jill Magid
| Jill Magid | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1973 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | multimedia and performance artist |
Jill Magid (born 1973) is an American artist. Her genre is difficult to categorize, but may she may be fairly described as a multimedia and performance artist.
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[edit] Life
Magid was graduated in 1995 from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She then studied at MIT and received a Master of Science degree in Visual Studies.
Magid lived for five years in Amsterdam where she was artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten from 2001 to 2002. She was with the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center In New York from 2006 to 2007.[1]
Magid's work has been shown at the Yvon Lambert Galleries in New York and Paris, the Gagosian Gallery in New York, and in The Hague, Netherlands. Her performances and installations have been shown worldwide in numerous group shows and fairs. She has an upcoming solo show at the Tate Modern gallery in London.
[edit] Works
Magid uses a variety of media in her work: video, photographs, installations, printed text, and books. Some of her work might also be characterized as performance art. A common theme in her works is documentation of her process of creating the work.
Magid's early work created soon after her study at MIT used spy cameras. In Lobby 7 (1999) and Surveillance Shoe (2000) Magid trained the cameras on herself while exploring the technology, logic, and gaze of surveillance. These pieces could be characterized as video art, performance art, and cultural analysis.
Her work after that involved entities that conduct surveillance, such as police, with a particular focus on their tendency to view people as anonymous. Magid would typically place herself within these systems while maintaining her individual identity by getting them to focus on her, with the intent of revealing and engaging the human persons behind the faceless eye of the surveillance camera.
[edit] System Azure
System Azure is an ongoing work initiated in 2003. In her explorations into surveillance while an artist in residence in Amsterdam, Magid proposed to the Amsterdam police an art project of decorating surveillance cameras. The police rejected this suggestion. Magid returned as a "Security Ornamentation Professional" attached to a fictitious company, complete with portfolio and business card, and pitched the same proposal — but this time as public relations rather than art.[2] This was accepted and Magid was hired to install her work.[3] An alteration of the social roles granted her access, and this point became as much a part of the work as the decorated cameras themselves.
Subsequent works have entailed Magid placing herself within larger systems related to surveillance and developing very close relationships within them. The work becomes a sort of collaboration with people working in these systems and the systems themselves. "I want to engage the system on an intimate, personal level; and for that, access is required."[2] This process of attempting access initiates collaboration, and as Magid engages large and impersonal bureaucratic entities the process generates a trail of documents, made available to the viewer to reconstruct Magid's narrative.
[edit] Evidence Locker
Evidence Locker is a 2004 work. During the Liverpool Biennial, Magid engaged Citywatch, Liverpool's closed–circuit video surveillance system (one of the largest in the world).[4] Magrid's strategy for gaining access made use of an exception to the law that all footage is erased after 31 days: if a person sends a request form describing who they are, where they were, and what they were doing (along with a photo and ten pounds), the police must store the footage in the evidence locker for seven years.[3] Magrid made such a request for 31 days straight, in the manner of love letters and diary entries.
She ultimately developed a rapport with the agents of Citywatch, and they began to follow her, facilitated by recognizing her patterns of movement and the red coat she wore for that purpose. As Magrid and Citywatch became more aware of each other, issues of trust and pitfalls in the logic of the system came out. In one instance, she stood in a square alone and closed her eyes for an extended amount of time. The video operators were afraid for her safety, but felt helpless because they couldn't tell her if something was going to happen. To take this further, she asked if she could borrow a radio receiver with an earplug so she could close her eyes in a busy street, and be guided by the agents watching.
This work, Evidence Locker, was exhibited in that year's Liverpool Biennial as a site–specific project. It consisted of video installations of Citywatch's footage as well as the written correspondences. Magid also created a website that allows access to the work but with certain elements (such as emails sent to the website viewer unlocking further parts of the site) that control the viewer's experience in such a way as to correspond to Margid's narrative.
[edit] Influences
[edit] Sophie Calle
An important precedent for Margid's work is French conceptual artist Sophie Calle who, like Magid, uses herself and events in her personal life to make her artwork. Less interested in larger entities, Calle instigates intimate interactions with strangers by, for instance, inviting people to sleep in her bed for an hour (The Sleepers, 1979). An inspiration for Magrid's technique of altering her identity to gain access to entities is found in Calle's The Hotel (1981), where Calle posed posed as a chambermaid at a hotel to look through and photograph the personal effects of hotel guests,[5] and The Shadow (1981), in which Calle was followed and photographed by a private detective hired by her mother — a clear influence on Evidence Locker, as both works open up inconspicuous or covert surveillance systems as the artists become their subjects.
[edit] Oddy, and Broomberg and Chanarin
Magid has also been influenced by the photo–journalism–cum–art of Jason Oddy and the duo of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, whose projects have involved accessing and photographing highly restricted places, which has involved working with government and military entities on tenuous grounds.[2] Like Magid, these artists strive to open up or make visible controversial facets of our culture which are hidden by official proscription.
[edit] References
- ^ Jill Magid. "CV". Jill Magid website. http://www.jillmagid.net/cv.php. Retrieved March 23, 2011.
- ^ a b c Oddy, Jason (May/June 2009). "An outsider's guide to getting inside places only insiders normally get to go". Art on Paper 13 (5): 58–71.
- ^ a b Rubin, Elizabeth. "Jill Magid". Bidoun (10). http://www.bidoun.org/magazine/10-technology/jill-magid-by-elizabeth-rubin/. Retrieved March 2011.
- ^ "Questions and answers". Website for the Evidence Locker project by Jill Magid. http://www.evidencelocker.net/question.php. Retrieved March 23, 2011.
- ^ Magid, Jill (Fall 2008). "Jill Magid interviews Sophie Calle". Tokion: 46–53.
