Opens September 20, 2025
Sara Magenheimer (11), Ill-Gotten Gains
Image: Slow Zoom Long Pause (video still), 2015
About
Ill-Gotten Gains is the first survey exhibition of artist Sara Magenheimer’s genre-defying video work which disrupts, manipulates, and defamiliarizes language with bold combinations of image, text, and sound. Borrowing strategies from collage, writing, and music, Magenheimer inventively explodes narrative convention. Her singular videos draw in the viewer and invite interpretation.
The world’s first computer programmer writes a letter to her mother. Human perspective is subverted as a jellyfish narrates his worldview. Hieronymous Bosch paintings rub elbows with popular cinema and an ancient military treatise. An infamous mouse explores the liberatory potential of a dance party. Siri is inundated with existential questions. Spaghetti sticks to and falls from the wall in a quest for meaning.
Magenheimer’s moving-image work, created between 2010–2025, parallels shifts in technology and culture which have positioned video as an indelible part of our screen-mediated lives. As the medium continues to shape our social sphere, daily habits, aesthetic norms, and attention spans, the artist asks us to consider it differently—synthesizing legacies of experimental film, documentary, poetry, cinema, music videos, and online culture into a dialect all its own.
Ill-Gotten Gains brings together for the very first time Magenheimer’s videos made over the past fifteen years, including Art and Theft, Best Is Man’s Breath Quality, Sentences, Seven Signs That Mean Silence, The Rhythm of Plain White, Which Arbitrary Thing Are You, and others, alongside text-based works Beige Pursuit, Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z, and more. Dotted across Fishers Island, the works punctuate day-to-day life—on view at Lighthouse Works, the supermarket, movie theater, hardware store, gas station, ferry, and many other sites. This exhibition format allows for unexpected encounters where the rhythms, textures, and temporalities of the everyday frame the work.
Sara Magenheimer: Ill-Gotten Gains is curated by Lighthouse Works' Curator-at-Large, Laurel Ptak, with the support of Community Coordinator, Claudia DeSimone and Fellowship Coordinator, Eliza Schmidt. Special thanks to Video Data Bank, Wendy’s Subway, Joseph Logan, Michael Bell-Smith, and all the collaborators across the island generously showing artworks in their spaces, without whom this show would not be possible.
Artist(s)
Sara Magenheimer is an artist preoccupied with language whose work has spanned filmmaking, video installation, writing, performance, collage, sound, and sculpture. She is based in New York and was a Lighthouse Works Fellow in 2014. Recent exhibitions include Timeshare, LA; University Art Museum, Albany, NY; New Museum, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, 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. In 2019, Wendy’s Subway published Beige Pursuit, Magenheimer’s first book. She is an Associate Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase College and faculty in the Moving Image discipline at the Bard MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
