Susan Magnus is a visual artist who explores themes of vulnerability, mortality, memory, and loss. She uses a breadth of materials to create and continuously expand a body of work that includes sculpture, photography, printmaking, drawing, and installations.
Past projects have focused on accumulations of both human-made objects and animal specimens reflecting the artist’s curiosity about the activity of collecting as well as the objectification of nature. Her early work found its genesis in memories of visiting ethnographic and natural history museums. While a sense of wonder was conjured by the diverse and idiosyncratic exhibitions in these institutions, the preservation of things within the context of the museum also evoked darker thoughts regarding the fragility of life and the inevitable futility of the curators’ efforts. Moreover, the organizing principles used within the museums often inadvertently revealed presumptions of hierarchy regarding the human species and of Western culture. The dichotomies of reverence and disregard, beauty and decay found within these institutions continue to inform her work.
Recent projects include distressed and manipulated photographs as well as three-dimensional works that combine hand-fabricated elements, organic material, and repurposed objects from domestic, educational, and medical environments of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Her sculpture includes an ongoing accumulation of National Geographic magazines transformed into a visual representation of the length of her life; vines and branches configured to resemble the veins of the human circulatory system; handblown glass forms that evoke insect life cycles; fabric such as velvet and wool that offer associations of melancholia and comfort; skeleton keys cast in bronze reminiscent of fairy tales; drawings made with chalk on schoolroom blackboards implying the possibility of erasure; as well as cabinets, bell jars, and methods of display that possess stylistic qualities of the distant past. Combining the nature-made and the human-made with objects from different eras, Magnus’s work calls attention to the intersection of nature and culture, the passage of time, and the ephemerality of the animate and the inanimate.
Work by Susan Magnus is represented in museum and corporate collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Oakland Museum of California; the Mills College Art Museum; the Microsoft Corporation; the Oracle Corporation; and the Bank of America Corporation. She is the recipient of a Regional Fellowship from the Western States Arts Federation and the National Endowment for the Arts; a Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fine Art Fellowship from the San Francisco Foundation; and a Visual Arts Purchase Award from the Gerbode Foundation. A former longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives in Beacon, NY.