Magic Show
- Rosamunde Bordo
Western Front is pleased to present Magic Show, a solo exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Rosamunde Bordo. The exhibition brings together new metal-cast, woodworked, glass blown, and sewn objects, alongside video. These forms resemble clues or magical instruments, positioning the figures of the detective and the magician as corresponding frameworks for making meaning through intuition and association, iteration and sleight of hand.
Magic Show builds on Bordo’s ongoing project The Denise File—an interdisciplinary work of serial detective fiction written through physical space and material form. Since 2018, The Denise File has evolved from Bordo’s interaction with a collection of found postcards addressed to a woman named Denise. With each chapter, Bordo responds by materializing objects, sourcing found items, and constructing installations. Paradoxically, through this, Denise becomes increasingly real, even as the same process of artistic invention renders her ever more fictive.
In Magic Show, ritual and investigation unfold in parallel. The works function as talismans holding material, linguistic, and supernatural resonances, while also acting as evidence of Denise’s existence. Together, they constitute the dispersed ingredients for a “potion” within the gallery space, one that corresponds and communes with Denise, conjuring her presence.
Working across craft- and time-based processes, Bordo approaches material practices as a reciprocal action between inner reality and the external environment. By learning to work with her hands in new ways, Bordo uncovers further aspects of the enigmatic Denise, who continues to emerge through tactile forms. Drawing on esoteric knowledge traditions, the works operate as conduits for sympathetic transference—where objects and their traces act upon one another, and upon us, across distance. In doing so, relationships between part and whole, microcosm and macrocosm, come into focus, opening onto speculative encounters that extend beyond empirical perception.
Curated by Kiel Torres.
About the Artist
Rosamunde Bordo is an artist based in Vancouver, Canada. Working through the logic of the detective genre, her practice collapses fiction and reality to probe how meaning, subjectivity, and belief are constructed relationally through material encounters. Her research unfolds through free association, analogy, and hands-on experimentation to question the assumed boundaries of the everyday. Her past projects have comprised handmade furniture, gemstones, intercepted letters, unrequited love, astrology, a stranger’s to-do list, magical alphabets, bread, wool, carrot tops, life drawing, table salt, tarot, television, small trees, hand-knitted sweaters, and a missing housecoat.
Accessibility
Western Front’s gallery is a ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible space. A partially accessible all-gender bathroom is available.
What to expect: This exhibition spans two rooms. One space is brightly lit and features a series of sculptural objects. The second space is low-lit and includes video and amplified sound. Portable seating is available upon request at reception.
Alternative formats: A transcript of the video is available at reception.
Further details about visiting and accessibility at Western Front can be found here.
Acknowledgements
Presented with support from the Audain Foundation.
Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.
We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.