Conjuring the Unexpected: Jeanette Andrews Reimagines Performance Art
Still from The Attention by Jeanette Andrews, courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Derrick Belcham.
“I have two memories of being alive before I was a magician,” says artist Jeanette Andrews. “I have no conception of being a person before becoming a magician.”
At four years old, Andrews’s parents gifted her a magic kit for Christmas. Taken by the theatricality of a Siegfried & Roy television special, she performed for the first time in front of her preschool class a few months later. Andrews continued practicing magic throughout her childhood, winning a regional contest for Kellogg's Razzle Dazzle at age seven and becoming a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians by fourteen. Still, it wasn’t until her early twenties that she discovered magic’s true power as a performance medium, using it to explore perceptual and cognitive questions about human behavior.
“As I got older, I started learning about the history of magic and how it had these different aesthetics,” she says. “In the mid to late 1800s, for example, magic had a slow-paced and beautiful feel. I think seeing the evolution of this visual and psychological style was really inspiring to me.”
Growing up in the ’90s, Andrews cut her teeth on the mass-consumerist style of magic typically associated with the era: men in rhinestoned costumes, elaborate set designs reminiscent of Las Vegas, and dramatic spectacles involving at least one exotic animal. Widely available beginner kits claimed “anyone” could try it at home, especially children, marking a shift in the art form’s perception. During its golden age from the 1880s to the 1930s, magic had a reputation comparable to opera or ballet because of pioneers such as Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and Alexander Herrmann. While theater productions declined during the Depression and died out by the ’50s, modern magicians in the ’70s and ’80s, like Doug Henning and David Copperfield, paved the way for the high-octane showmanship we recognize now.
“Magic had a specific aesthetic during the ’90s, and it fit very well with everything else back then,” Andrews says. “It had to be very flashy and spectacular, and the production value was extraordinarily high. For that to be my first exposure to magic, which is already fantastical, felt totally captivating.”
Still from Taken by Artificial Surprise by Jeanette Andrews, courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Derrick Belcham.
After a suggestion from her mentor, Arthur Trace, Andrews realized magic could express more abstract ideas. As if a whole cosmos of opportunity had opened up, she devoured anything from old manuscripts to the musings of Jean-Paul Sartre, circumventing the art school route for lived experience as a magician. Her interdisciplinary approach, which blended science, philosophy, and folklore, earned Andrews her first artist residency at Escape to Create in Florida in 2013 and similar opportunities in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. For our interview, we met over afternoon tea at the National Arts Club, where she’s enjoying the remainder of a fellowship. Andrews’s passion was contagious as she recounted her career trajectory, including moving to New York in 2021 to further her practice.
In July 2022, shortly before artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT hit the mainstream, Andrews debuted Taken by Artificial Surprise at Culture Lab LIC in Queens. The performance explored the parallels between parlor magic and machine learning, asking attendees to step inside “a Turing Test of sorts.” In 2023, she unveiled In Plain Listen, a piece commissioned by the University of Houston highlighting The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a 16th-century magic book by author Reginald Scot. She translated an illusion from the text—the first of its kind published in English—into Morse code and created a musical notation system for a cello score, which composer Issei Herr played as she performed. Unaware of the message in the music, small groups filtered through the space as Andrews captivated people with a simple candle and thread, showing how some secrets hide in plain sight.
“Magic is usually shared through print books and hands-on teaching. With the rise of the internet, there’s a lot of magic online, but so much to learn by doing,” Andrews says. “Magicians operate in an insular community based on secrets. A lot of times, these books are printed in limited runs because they’re so niche. And, of course, to maintain the integrity of those secrets.”
Still from Taken by Artificial Surprise by Jeanette Andrews, courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Derrick Belcham.
The element of surprise is central to the success of a magic trick—the act is, in essence, predicated on withholding knowledge, on maintaining an unequal dynamic between magician and observer. Historically speaking, there’s been a fine line between surprise and deceit: The CIA hired John Mulholland to write a manual on trickery and deception during the Cold War. Andrews delved into this topic for a group show, Smoke and Mirrors, which ran at the Boca Raton Museum of Art from November 2023 to May 2024. Her installation magi.cia.n was one of many examining the connection between performance magic and the so-called “magical thinking” that contributes to our current culture of skepticism, conspiracies, and “alternative facts.”
“People always approach magic with their guards up, but arguably, it’s one of the only deceptions that isn’t actually surprising,” says Andrews. With magi.cia.n, she constructed a book enclosed in a box for visitors to place their hands in and flip through. At first, the pages revealed some magic theory she wrote, and after, parts of a Spycraft manual. “When you enter a magic show, the cultural framework lets you know you’ll be deceived. And then you are. I can’t think of another deception that functions like that.”
Still from documentation of Taken by Artificial Surprise by Jeanette Andrews, courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Derrick Belcham.
Recently, Andrews has pivoted her focus toward the instability of knowledge, particularly how we use biased reasoning to ascribe meaning to the unknown. In 2025, she will be the visiting artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, where she’ll spend a year collaborating with Professor Graham Jones and Professor Arvind Satyanarayan. Building on academic research, the project aims to dissect how the public perceives and transmits visually deceptive information, analyzing the link between magic and the rampant distrust surrounding health data. Andrews plans to devise a site-specific installation related to causal inferences, priming devices, and counterfactual thinking as the capstone of her residency. She’s tight-lipped about the specifics, though, eager to keep the suspense bubbling.
“Magic sort of acts as scaffolding,” Andrews tells me. “You have a stable, genuine sense of reality on both sides, and in the middle, there’s something that’s either not there at all or isn’t as it seems. You need those two pillars on either side to make that leap and fill it in with what you think should be there.”
Traditional magic relies on closing those gaps so we don’t reflect on them, but Andrews strives to illuminate the hidden spaces instead. She wants to expose the cracks, to make the invisible visible, taking what many call cognitive dissonance and transforming the strangeness into something profound. Her work challenges ingrained beliefs about the nature of existence, and she hopes it helps others look inward, too—so long as she keeps the illusion alive, even just for herself.
