“if recopying is to author”

“‘if recopying is to author’ is a line from Magi’s SPEECH (Nightboat 2019) and is also the poetics underpinning the sequence of paintings, embroideries, hand-weavings, and handmade books in this exhibition. In both her poetry and visual work, Magi’s method is to copy and recopy, juxtapose, and enjamb. This revives the western pre-modern definition of writer as scribe and text as a drawn line that moves, where what’s centered is the physical endurance of writing a page to be read aloud, communally, and presented as a field to wander through rather than a map with a fixed arrival point.”