“Growing up in the ’90s,” said illusionist Jeanette Andrews, “magic was peak kitsch.”
Andrews doesn’t do kitsch. She travels in art-world circles, crafting performances, films, and installations that question the limits and foibles of human perception. Her 2022 show “Taken by Artificial Surprise” mixed historic parlor tricks with AI-devised sleights of hand. She invited her audience to tell the difference.
Two years ago, MIT professors Graham Jones and Arvind Satyanarayan invited Andrews to the MIT Center for Art, Science, & Technology as a visiting artist. Jones is a scholar of the anthropology of magic, and Satyanarayan an expert in data visualization as disinformation.
“They were looking at visual misinterpretations,” Andrews said. “Whose job is it to create visual misinterpretations? Magicians.”
On Oct. 3 and 4, she presents “The Attestation: A Performance of Illusions,” a site-specific show and installation about polarized beliefs at MIT’s Kresge Little Theater. She calls it “a thought experiment.”
Where to find her: arts.mit.edu/people/jeanette-andrews/
Age: 35
Originally from: Chicago suburbs
Lives in: Queens, N.Y.
Making a living: Andrews’s art pays her way.
Studio: She works in her 290-square-foot studio apartment, doing research, scribbling notes longhand, and posting them on the walls. She’s “24/7 surrounded in every inch of my life, blood, sweat, and tears in this project,” she said.
How she started: When Andrews was 4, she saw a Siegfried & Roy TV special. Soon after, she performed a 15-minute magic set for her preschool class. At 6, she made her professional debut.
Once she was a teenager, parlor tricks were no longer enough. She wondered “what magic would really look like in terms of expressing other ideas,” she said.
What she makes: At MIT, the artist read a statistics paper by Kartik Chandra, a PhD candidate studying visual computing systems, which laid the groundwork for “Attestation.” The performance is intended to “showcase the really deep-rooted mechanisms at play that make belief polarization happen in the mind, and how that can be illustrated using magic,” Andrews said.
“It’s the first time I’ve made something with a twist ending,” she added.
How she works: “The type of performance I do is pass/fail,” she said. “I have to prepare in advance as much as humanly possible for every contingency that could possibly occur.”
“What if somebody stands up, grabs my stuff, and tries to break it?” she said. “Sounds insane. It happened to me. What if a vent kicks on? I have to account for all of that in advance. For every object, every movement, every angle, every everything. Then on top of that, be ready to adjust on the fly to things in a moment.”
Advice for artists: The late magician Eugene Burger once told Andrews, “There is the way of the potter and the way of the sculptor. The potter adds, and the sculptor chips away. Be a sculptor.”
“I’ve always got a tiny Eugene sitting on my shoulder,” she said, “whispering ‘chip away at this.’”
THE ATTESTATION: A Performance of Illusions
At MIT Kresge Little Theater, Building W16, 48 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge. 5 p.m.-6:30 p.m. on Oct. 3 and 3 p.m.-4:30 p.m. on Oct. 4. General admission $15. Registration required. arts.mit.edu/people/jeanette-andrews/