What is the name on your passport?
Magali Duzant
Where do you live and make work? (Hows does living in your studio or having a studio separate from your home effect the way you think about making art?)
I live in Queens and have a studio in Bushwick. Having a separate studio pushes me to be there, making work, treating this as the best day job possible.
What medium/media do you work in?
I work in photography, video, text, and installation.
What is the subject matter of your work?
Transcendence of time and space, the act and faith of looking and searching, desire and longing. I am attempting to make personal experiences and relations to greater, overwhelming events into collective experiences.
What's your favorite person, place, or thing right now?
San Francisco remains forever my dream place as a space to go to in my mind to escape the hustle of NY. I love the Noguchi museum as a space to think.
What do you listen to in the studio?
NPR. Exciting stuff! Sometimes I'll put on music, anything from Patsy Cline to Black Marble, but I like zoning out to interviews or podcasts such as RadioLab. I also have a bit of an obsession with Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.
How do you explain your carrier choice at family gatherings?
I think the fact that I work with photography, a somewhat more approachable field to people not in the art world, makes it a much easier explanation. My family is really supportive and though and tend to be up and interested in what I do. It doesn't hurt that I can say “oh, and I did this freelance job...”
What community do you see your work living in?
Romantic Conceptualism.
Who are you favorite artists?
Felix Gonzales-Torres, Robert Kinmont, James Turrell.
How do you see yourself in 40 years?
Making work on an even grander scale.
If you were creating film and/or books syllabus what would be on your list?
Films:
Mirror, Stalker - Andrei Tarkovsky
The Searchers – John Ford
Here Is Always Somewhere Else – documentary about Bas Jan Ader
Badlands – Terrence Malick
Vertigo – Alfred Hitchcock
Books:
Landscape & Memory – Simon Schama
The Future of Nostalgia – Svetlana Boym
Camera Lucida – Roland Barthes
The Aesthetics of Disappearance – Paul Virilio
The Poetics of Space – Gaston Bachelard
Burning With Desire – Geoffrey Batchen
Lure of the Local – Lucy Lippard
What do you hope people will think about looking at your work?
My work draws on personal experiences, which serve as catalysts to explore much larger, universal events. I hope that people lose themselves a bit in the work and return to a personal experience of their own and then just let their minds drift and be in the moment.
What was the last exhibition you saw that knocked your socks off?
Alejandro Cesarco at Murray Guy. His use of text always blows my mind and I had the pleasure of seeing him speak on On Kawara at Dia a few weeks later. It all came full circle somehow.
How often do you show your work to friends?
I try to get a lot of feedback from friends. When you sit on your work too long you can miss the obvious, it’s a bit like the phrase “the forest for the trees”. About every two weeks I show something, be it in person or just a quick jpeg in an email to get some feedback. It also helps me to get my thoughts on the project clear – visualizing and verbalizing.
