Thomas Makes a Wish
She wore dresses the patterns of the wallpaper.
Thomas is learning the piano. He practices at work, on the piano in the bar.
He'd liketo have one at home, and knows exactly where he'd put it.
Two mornings a week, Abigail keeps the house. She washes, cleans, and irons
the things that Thomas uses.
Appearing as replaced, the furniture is missing. Thomas is not sure where it went,
but suspects it could be Germany.
Upstairs in his bedroom, on the windowsill over the garden, Thomas keeps a slide.
He holds the image to the glass, and lets the light shine through it.
Press Release by Florence Derieux
Jill Magid approaches reality through the isolation of its details, the images of which she then reflects through a mirror game. Hence, she operates a change of scale and of meaning on everything she comes to explore - whether it be a space, a system or an idea.
Jill Magid is interested in space, be it public or private, and more specifically, the way the space is, has been, or can be inhabited. For her, histories and stories are a space's raw materials and exist to be built upon. In the building process, the artist develops and constructs a fictional story where she herself is the author. Her construction is a fabrication : an alternative space that exists within, or parallel to, the original.
For her exhibition at Maison Grégoire, the artist focused on the work of its architect, Henry van de Velde, and his desire to visually incorporate the inhabitants into their own domestic space. Henry van de Velde is indeed well known for having created dresses to match the decoration motives in the houses he designed, often using his wife as a model. Hence, he gave ornament and fashion a structural role-rather than a subordinate one, within architecture.
Jill Magid's project incorporates Henry van de Velde's ideas and personal history into the current status of the house as home of Thomas Simon. In the process, Thomas himself becomes a fiction. As a character in the theater of his house, he has been granted, by Jill Magid, a series of wishes...