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Medium

Sara Magenheimer

2022 00:10:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:94K video

Description

This film originated as an expanded portrait of artist Carol Bove as she created four monumental sculptures commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One week after filming began, New York City went into its first pandemic lockdown. Filmed against the backdrop of the progressing pandemic, Medium evolved into a meditation on materiality and the artist as a medium through which ideas move into the world. We see Bove work with steel as if it’s as malleable as clay, wrestling with illusionism, scope and scale to materialize sculptures that appear at once massive and weightless in the niches of the Met’s façade. Robert Stillman’s music is the propulsive soundtrack to the parallel narratives of a strong spirit of perseverance, a kind of triumph of expression in the face of literalism, and wonder over didacticism. Filming began in February of 2020 and the works were installed in February of 2021. In the interim the whole world changed.

About Sara Magenheimer

Sara Magenheimer is an artist with a background in music whose work spans filmmaking, video installation, writing, and sculpture. She is based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the New Museum, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), OR; The Kitchen, NY. Her videos have been widely screened including the Flaherty Seminar, Oberhausen Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New York Film Festival, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, EMPAC at RPI, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was the recipient of a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, 2015 Artadia Award, the Prix De Varti at the 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2020 and awarded a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva in 2021. Magenheimer authored Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z leading up to and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2019 Wendy’s Subway published Beige Pursuit, Magenheimer’s first book length work of writing, which is now in its second edition.  

See Also: Sara Magenheimer: An Interview

photo by Mary Manning

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