Susan Magnus (b. 1957, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist who creates photographs, sculptures, works on paper, and installations that explore themes of ephemerality.
Her earliest projects found their genesis in memories of visiting ethnographic and natural history museums. While a sense of wonder was conjured by the diverse and idiosyncratic exhibitions she experienced, the preservation of things within the context of these institutions also evoked darker thoughts regarding the fragility of life and the futility of the curators’ efforts. Moreover, the organizing principles used within the museums often inadvertently revealed presumptions of hierarchy regarding species and culture. The dichotomies of reverence and disregard, beauty and decay, found within these institutions continue to inform her work.
Her most recent projects are created in response to film, photographs, and artifacts she inherited after the cognitive decline and death of her mother. Reflecting on these bequests, Magnus found the vulnerability and deterioration of the pre-digital snapshots emblematic of the fleeting nature of memory and the inevitability of loss. Moreover, her mother’s treasured objects—some pristine, others in disrepair—were not only a source of recollection but insistent reminders of the fugitive nature of all things. Initially, exploring this vernacular material allowed the artist to process grief and past events; in time, it inspired an ongoing body of work in which she appropriates and transforms pictures and possessions to create enigmatic, alternative visual experiences.
Magnus received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and The New School, New York, NY, and her MFA from Mills College, Oakland, CA. 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. Her work is represented in public collections, including the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley, CA; the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; and the Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA. The artist has participated in exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley, CA; the CCS Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY; the Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York, New Paltz, NY. She currently lives and works in Beacon, New York.