Jill Magid

Labor presents Tender, the new individual exhibition by the American artist Jill Magid.

The artist will show the film “Tender Balance” alongside related works that expand upon her 2020 Creative Time public artwork, “Tender”.

In each of her in-depth projects, Jill Magid becomes intimately involved with different systems or structures of authority, whether government bureaucracies, a secret service agency, or the guardians of other artists’ estates. Gaining access through existing loopholes or contact with people on the inside, she follows the rules of engagement with each institution and draws out their internal logics. In a way, she becomes a stand-in for any person trying to navigate something much larger than themselves. As the pandemic began, the complex relationships between individuals, groups of people, institutions, and deeply rooted systems quickly came into stark relief. Magid was especially struck by the way public figures weighed the loss of human lives against the supposed costs for the economy. Against this backdrop, she began developing a project that would take multiple forms, all centering on the circulation of pennies, but unfolding with different durations and degrees of visibility.

The exhibition at Labor follows the movement of pennies and some of their afterlives adding an extra layer related to the economic flows between Mexico and the United States and how these interdependent flows affect each other. Reflecting her unique approach as an artist, the exhibition has aspects that are intimate and poetic while also observing broader systems around us, in this case the intertwining of the economy and the lives of individual people. Thinking about different forms of vulnerability and various traces left behind, the works in the show bring out hints of absence and loss as they follow the flows of circulation on both a small and large scale.

The multimedia project “Tender” has been featured in major exhibitions through the past two years such as “FOCUS: Jill Magid” at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2022) and “Jill Magid – Tender: Balance” at the Renaissance Society in Chicago (2021).

— Labor

Image: Jill Magid, "Tender Balance", 2021. (Still).