Catriona Jeffries

The relationship between the real and reproduced has been a key point of exploration for Vancouver-based artist Liz Magor throughout her celebrated career. Storage Facilities features recent works that suggest a collision of domesticity with nature, while looking at the display and delivery of objects.

A series of cast sculptures—food trays, wrapped candies, half-smoked cigarettes, pocket-sized bottles of liquor—are presented atop tables and appear to be leftovers from a bout of compulsive consumption. Lying in the debris are the exhausted bodies of small animals, speaking to a higher order of waste. Testing the boundaries between the authentic and imagined, the forms are humble, yet extraordinary. Collected together, they generate a complication of allure and aversion that is not easily resolved.

Liz Magor produces sculptural and photo-based works that sensitively address issues of place and refuge, creation and transformation, production and reproduction, identity and the material, yet fragile, condition of the human body. Since the early 1970s, Magor's work has been exhibited nationally in solo exhibitions in Vancouver, Victoria, Lethbridge, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, Oakville and London, England. Her work has also been included in a number of important national and international group exhibitions, including Comic Relief (National Gallery of Canada, 2008), The Tree: From the Sublime to the Social (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008), Intertidal - Vancouver Art and Artists (MuHKA, Antwerp, Belgium, 2005), Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art (touring exhibition, 2003 – 2005), Real Fictions: Four Canadian Artists (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, 1997), Notion of Conflict: A Selection of Contemporary Canadian Art (Stedelijk Musuem, Amsterdam, 1995), Active Surplus: The Economy of the Object (The Power Plant, 1987), Documenta VIII (Kassel, Germany, 1987), and XLI Biennale di Venezia (Venice, Italy, 1984).