“This time of social upheaval has re-invigorated language as it performs publicly, in posters and protest signs, tweets, captions, chyrons and political speeches,” writes artist, poet, and filmmaker Sara Magenheimer. Magenheimer sublimates her own poetic language into the work in her commissioned solo exhibition Dailies. Turbulent distortions of vinyl texts spanning the museum walls, still and animated text in her video works, and intimately scaled wire and found object sculptures embody the major themes of the exhibition—rest, absence, motion, stillness. Ever sensitive to architecture and the body, Magenheimer has created a contemplative environment inviting viewers to move with and through language and subtly reflect on power, politics, and poetics.
Sara Magenheimer is an artist 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; and The Kitchen, NY. Her videos have been widely screened, including at 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 has been awarded a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, a 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 a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva in 2021. Magenheimer authored Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z, in the lead up to 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. Her work is distributed by Video Data Bank.
Support for the University Art Museum Fall 2022 exhibitions and programs is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, The University at Albany Foundation, the University at Albany Alumni Association, the University Auxiliary Services at Albany, and the Robin Kanson Lewis ’70 Exhibition Endowment Fund.
Image credit: Sara Magenheimer, Is there an after-taste of life in these graves? And in the flowers’ mouths do bees find the hint of a word refusing speech? O flowers, prisoners of our instincts toward happiness, do you return to us with our dead in your veins? Flowers, how can you escape our grip? How can you not be our flowers? Does the rose really use all its petals to fly away from us? Does it want to be only a rose, nothing but a rose? No one’s sleep beneath so many eyelids? (Flower Clock) (still), 2022, HD video, 24-hour video loop; color, no sound, courtesy of the artist
