Jill Magid presents a yearlong installation at Dia Bridgehampton, New York, which will be open from July 25th to June 6th 2021. Magid’s practice interrogates structures of power on an intimate level, exploring the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions that exist between institutions and individual agency.
For her exhibition at Dia Bridgehampton, the conceptual artist, writer and filmmaker Jill Magid presents her new body of work, the Homage CMYK series (2019), an immersive installation in which she extends her years-long interrogation of Luis Barragán’s archive and surroundings. “Her intimate understanding and reinterpretation of this imagery is both revealing and poetic,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.
In dialogue with Dan Flavin’s permanent installation of fluorescent light works on the second floor of the building, the layered, luminous surfaces of Homage CMYK call into question authorship, influence, and how an object changes in relation to its context over time. Homage CMYK takes as its starting point two impressions derived from Josef Albers' iconic series, Homage to the Square (1950–75). In the library and living room of Mexican architect Luis Barragán in his Mexico City home, famed for the interplay of light and shadows on the house’s geometric, brightly colored walls, the copies of this Josef Albers’ series are found.
Substantially different from the original oil paintings, the published reproductions of the Homages in this domestic setting magnify the changing effects of natural and artificial light on the surfaces of counterfeits. For Homage CMYK, Jill Magid scanned the photographic reproductions, cut out the skewed and manipulated works again into their intended square format. Finally printing them again in their original size and support, this time layered with multiple reproduction processes including commercial printing, photography, book publishing and Photoshop.
“The surfaces of Homage CMYK layer several authors and temporalities over a single image,” said Matilde Guidelli Guidi, exhibition curator, “The ethics of sharing ownership over an image, revealed by the relationship between Albers and Barragán, opens up a space for Magid to insert herself and weave an interrogation of intellectual property rights into these beautifully textured works.”
