In 2019, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University co-organized an exhibition of a newly commissioned body of work by the Canadian artist Liz Magor. The accompanying publication, Liz Magor: BLOWOUT, is the artist’s first US catalog in ten years, and it features thorough photographic documentation of the new work, commissioned texts by Mitch Speed and Sheila Heti, and a conversation between the artist and curators Dan Byers and Solveig Øvstebø.

For more than four decades, Magor’s practice has quietly dramatized the relationships that develop among objects, and she describes this body of work as “a collection of tiny and intense narratives.” Each written contribution responds in its own way to Magor’s new installations, which feature altered stuffed toys, bits of paper, and rat skins—sculptural “agents,” in the artist’s words—suspended in transparent Mylar box forms, and thirty-two pairs of secondhand shoes, each displayed within its own box amidst elaborate embellishments.