Standing in the gap between specialized academic art criticism and the commercial contemporary art world, I embrace both the academic disciplinization of knolwedge and the mediasophere, or, the surface versus the ground. George Magalios Studios was founded as a way of bringing together my diverse creative interests: painting, sculpture, installation, peformance, and photography. Directional Forces is the forum where my writings on these and other subjects such as film, politics, and music come together. Directional Forces is a kind of training ground for a variety of ideas and projects which will result in books. With a Master’s Degree from San Francisco State University in Humanities where I wrote on the relationship between Joseph Beuys’s notion of social sculpture and Martin Heidegger’s deconstruction of techne and poiesis; and a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Carnegie Mellon, I live within both contemporary theoretical/philosophical and contemporary art paradigms.

Born in Montreal and having lived in San Francisco, New York, Pittsburgh, Paris and West Palm Beach, I have come to see art as a form of bringing forth in that it reveals things previously concealed. As both a writer and artist, I have learned to value the linkages between materiality, our sense of place, and the interstices between values and people as they apply to a particular political or social site. This has lead me to consider art as a basic material relationship that involves economic, social, historical, and of course, political epistemologies.

My work as a painter, photographer, sculptor, and performance artist is a reflection of this stance and emerges from the passionate belief in the empowering qualities of social sculpture and art proper. Directional Forces, named after a work by Joseph Beuys, is my articulation of these thoughts.

-George A. Magalios