Maggi's work forges connections between what he may loosely consider the binaries and the ironies of language. He describes his works' boundaries as "text/textures, technology/biology, micro/macro (mother board/city, gene/planet), printmaking/no prints, drawing/Darwin … excess/progress."(3) Through his provocative title, Global Myopia, Maggi suggests that we may suffer from a shortsighted view of the world. He finesses a pun on myopic vision - the ability to see close-up, but not far away - thereby punning on a culture's inability to see the big picture. Paradoxically, Maggi's tiny works attempt to synopsize that big picture. He suggests his discontent with contemporary modes of communication that obfuscate personal contact, and he unwraps for us his romanticist's delight with intimacy. His "engravings" on aluminum foil provide a playful engagement with prosaic materials. Using two different methods of display - rerolling a roll of aluminum foil once he has "engraved" a portion of it, and inserting other miniscule aluminum foil "engravings" into 35mm slide casings - Maggi contrasts the seen with the unseen, the authentic with the stand-in.

Slides are the most common vehicle of commerce and communication among artists, galleries, curators, and museums. Maggi replaces a slide image of his work with a tiny actual work of art (one that cannot be projected and thus enlarged for potentially better viewing) and suggests that this uninterrupted communication - the slide-that-is-no-longer-a-slide is the art - is, in fact, a far more valuable experience than the 35mm projectable slide, a mere stand-in. Maggi queries the inherent imperfections in how artists, galleries, and curators understand one another and an artist's work. Wireless communiqués cannot replicate intimacy, and slides and email are imperfect paths to personal and professional relationships.

Acknowledging an increasingly complex network of global and personal communication that sometimes disconnects us bodily and emotionally from one another, Maggi physically and metaphorically unpacks and even redresses this dissonance. With his finely delineated engravings, etchings, and drawings whose delicate hand requires close personal proximity between his work and our bodies, Maggi humanizes the dehumanizing effects of our technological progression. His human touch, intimately drawn out, shivers throughout the work.

Dana Self
Curator, Kemper Museum

NOTES
1. Artist's statement, February 1999.
2. Artist's statement, February 1999.
3. Artist's statement on his installation plan for Kemper Museum exhibition, 2001.

Marco Maggi was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and received his M.F.A. from the State University of New York, New Paltz. He now lives in New York. Maggi is an artist in residence at the Kemper Museum, working with students for three days prior to his exhibition opening.

* This text was reproduced from the exhibition catalog with permission from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

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