NYAB Event - Jill Magid "Shot from the Capitol Steps"

Jill Magid "Shot from the Capitol Steps"

Location One

This event has ended.

While on a research trip, Magid witnessed a mysterious shooting on the steps of the Texas State Capitol by Fausto Cardenas. Nothing is known of Cardenas’s motivations, but his gesture of shooting into the sky on the steps of the capitol, where he knew he would be immediately captured, reads symbolically as both tragic and poetic. Magid connects his action to Faust, an obvious but ultimately fruitful and complex avenue of exploration, as Goethe’s nineteenth-century drama traffics in similar themes of tragedy, psychology, and futility.

Goethe originally wrote Faust as a ‘closet drama’: a drama to be read alone or to a small group, rather than performed on stage. For the event at Location One, Magid experiments with the concept of “theatre of the mind” by inviting the audience for an intimate closet drama reading.

Jill Magid’s event at Location One is part of a work-in-progress. The artist takes this program up on its idea of a safe place to try out something new and unfinished, and rough. This will not be a complete drama from beginning to end! Jill Magid seeks intimate relations with impersonal structures. She is intrigued by hidden information, being public as a condition for existence, and intimacy in relation to power and observation. Magid holds a M.F.A from Cornell University, and an M.S in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has shown nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; and Gagosian Gallery, NY. Upcoming exhibitions include the Singapore Biennial, and the Matrix Program at Berkeley Art Museum, CA. Magid is represented by Yvon Lambert, New York and Paris. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.