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Some things you can ask me

Sara Magenheimer

2022 00:21:45 United StatesEnglishColorSilent16:9HD video

Description

Prompted by Apple’s Siri to ask questions, Magenheimer takes the AI invitation seriously and invents a long list of queries. We see them appear one by one over scanned images from Architectural Digest magazine’s idealized interiors of 1981, the year Magenheimer was born and the year Ronald Reagan became president. In this video Magenheimer considers the ways in which the aspirational style of the period we are born into reflects the socio-political values of the cultural moment and how interior design acts as a daily domestic backdrop against which we perform. Embracing arbitrariness, coincidence and humor in this video Magenheimer creates opportunities for questioning how power and style form the aesthetic substructure of our daily existence.

About Sara Magenheimer

Sara Magenheimer is an artist with a background in music 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; The Kitchen, NY. Her videos have been widely screened including 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 was the recipient of a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, 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 awarded a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva in 2021. Magenheimer authored Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z leading up to and following 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.  

See Also: Sara Magenheimer: An Interview

photo by Mary Manning