Erika Vogt: Image Blockers

The scope of Vogt’s work encompasses video, sculpture, drawing, and performance. For this exhibition Vogt will present a group of new videos, as well as an installation of new drawings and sculpture. The videos are constructed using layers of footage of both original and found images and objects. Vogt’s interest in calendric structures is present throughout the work. The two part video titled “Book XII” cycles through film of an analogue wall clock and a digital alarm clock, intercut with vignettes of the artist reading the newspaper. Each video shifts through collections of still images, recorded actions, and fields of objects, while the plane of reference remains in flux. Segments of video show the artist shuffling through a deck of cards and rotating transparent acrylic forms, overlayed with drawings of charts and graphs. Other clips document anthropological forms presented in the artist’s hands to reveal faint patterns imprinted in their surfaces.

Two sculptural works are based on ancient Cycladic terra cotta vessels. These objects were etched with diagrams of astronomical phenomena and are believed to have functioned as complex calendars based on the sun and moon. Vogt’s videos capture images of porcelain facsimiles of these vessels cast using 3D scans drawn from photographic documentation. Vogt’s sculptural depictions of these artifacts form a base to present drawings created using a digital embroidery machine. Graphs and charts clipped from newspapers are scanned and then transcribed into thread on paper via the device.

Two large drawings are constructed from grids of painted newspapers adorned with acrylic silhouettes. The newspapers first functioned as physical background materials for the videos, providing tactile surfaces and fields of signs. Their outer surfaces are now sealed in paint and affixed with groups of transparent forms. A starburst-like shape dots one grid of papers, while the repeated form of a lemon sits atop the second set. The starburst is traced from early celestial maps, and the lemon is a reference to Hollis Frampton’s 1969 film, Lemon, in which the film’s lighting effects appear to simulate the lunar phases. The layering in both Vogt’s videos and drawings tunes the attention beyond the foreground and levels all planes.

“To the degree that the ubiquitous digital camera and its readily reproducible pictures have been transmitted, virus-like, into the consumer mainstream, artists have been undoing the conventional limits of digital image-making with equal urgency and efficacy. Erika Vogt is among the most skilled of these artists. In Vogt's videos, the picture plane is mirrored, inverted, negated and rejected altogether; 'subject' exists almost incidentally, and portraiture is staged by disallowing the self.”

Catherine Taft, Art Review

Erika Vogt (b.1973, East Newark, NJ) received her BFA from New York University and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Vogt’s videos and sculptures have taken the form of large-scale installations and collaborative theatrical performances. Vogt’s background in both feminist and queer video and her involvement in experimental film in Los Angeles continue to inform her work. Solo exhibitions have been organized by the New Museum in New York, Triangle France in Marseilles, and the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire. Vogt's work has been included in exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Vogt’s work is included in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Theatrical commissions of Vogt’s Artist Theater Program have been hosted by the ICA in Miami, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Performa in New York. Vogt is currently completing a Doctoral Fellowship at Columbia University in New York.