Mother’s life inspires daughter’s art
Many artists dislike titling their work, says Susan Magnus, whose exhibit, ImageAfter, opens at the Garrison Art Center from 5 to 7 p.m. on Saturday (Sept. 21). “I struggle with titles because words can be limiting,” she says. “I prefer not to dictate the viewer’s experience.”
Preparing for the show in her bright Beacon studio, Magnus wavered between leaving some works untitled or naming them, reluctantly settling on a monosyllabic moniker for the photo manipulation of a sentimental Scottish Elm on Long Island, where she grew up: “Tree.”
She distorted the photo by blowing it up and breaking it down into 66 sections using paper and glue from Japan, then applied and reassembled the image. The process omits key portions of the picture so that the patterns created by the gnarly trunk and branches evoke an X-ray in which the bones are disconnected.
“It’s a portrait of a tree that’s distressed but also resilient,” she says.
The drawings, sculptures and photo-based items in the Garrison show are particularly personal, most based on a cache of items inherited after her mother died last year.
Other works hark to a childhood that included trips to ethnographic and natural history museums, where she experienced shrunken heads, a 3,000-year-old mummy and pickled creatures in glass jars.
“Untitled (Cabinet)” arranges a tangle of wisteria vines inside a gilded glass-and-wood cabinet from her mother’s dining room. “It’s like one of those cabinets of curiosities and suggests a complicated relationship between nature and culture,” she says.
In the studio, Magnus peers close at a photo negative of her mother, pointing out the imperfections, which are magnified because she enlarged and exposed it for an extended period. Squiggly scratches and white spots mar the surface.
“By manipulating analog photographs, I’m able to reveal and enhance evidence of handling — the fingerprints, the dust, the scratches — reflecting the passage of time and the vulnerability of the material.”
In one sculpture, “The Red Shoes,” her mother’s ballet slippers seem to glow inside a glass rectangle. Magnus’s mother attracted the attention of choreographer George Balanchine, but the dream died the day she was hit by a taxi on her way to Penn Station.
Next, she became a fashion model and dressed to the nines, with gloves and mink stoles. Visiting Sentinel Dome in Yosemite National Park, she donned high heels and formal wear while posing next to the now deceased Jeffrey Pine tree that grew out of a rock, as depicted in her daughter’s piece, “Sentinel,” a UV print on linen.
Though the objects draw on her mother’s life, they speak to larger issues, Magnus says. “Beyond sentimentality, the vulnerability of pre-digital snapshots seems emblematic of the fleeting nature of memory and the inevitability of loss we all experience.”
The trove also triggered reflections about “what her life was like before I came along. It’s a mystery, and I’m intrigued by it.”
Despite the loss of her mother, Magnus is content and upbeat. The Fine Art Museums of San Francisco purchased six of her works last year and she has a gleaming new studio behind her Civil War-era brick house that includes a jib and a gate in the balcony fence to hoist objects with a rope.
“You can tell the studio is new because the floor is clean,” she says. “It’s my happy place.”
The Garrison Art Center, at 23 Garrison’s Landing, is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except Monday. Magnus will discuss her work at the gallery on Oct. 5 and host workshops for families and adults on Oct. 19. ImageAfter continues through Oct. 20.
