Dia Bridgehampton: Jill Magid

Dia presents a yearlong installation of new work by the Conceptual artist, writer, and filmmaker Jill Magid at Dia Bridgehampton in Bridgehampton, New York. Magid’s practice interrogates structures of power on an intimate level, exploring the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions that exist between institutions and individual agency. For her exhibition at Dia Bridgehampton, Magid presents the series Homage CMYK (2019), consisting of eleven four-channel screen prints on linen hung to fit the gallery in an immersive installation. In dialogue with Dan Flavin’s permanent installation of fluorescent light works on the second floor of the building, the layered, luminous surfaces of Homage CMYK call into question authorship, influence, and how an object changes in relation to its context over time.

This series takes as its departure point two unlicensed screen prints on linen derived from Josef Albers’s iconic series Homage to the Square (1950–75). The copies hang in Mexican architect Luis Barragán’s library and living room at his preserved Mexico City home, famed for the interplay of light and shadows on the house’s geometric, brightly colored walls. Already substantially different from the original oil paintings that they purport to be, published photographic reproductions of the Homages in this domestic setting magnify the changing effects of natural and artificial light on the surfaces of the counterfeits. To make Homage CMYK, Magid scanned the photographic reproductions, cropped the skewed works, and manipulated them back into their intended square format, finally printing them again in their original size and support—now layered with multiple reproduction processes, including commercial printing, photography, book publication, and Photoshop.