22: Marxism Issue

Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll

By &

August 12, 2013

Challenge systems. Play with unexpected boundaries. Explore the ability of objects to mutate, change, and be inconstant. Fluctuate.

Some artists respond to ideological and economic situations through a direct, activist-like questioning of the systems that have led to increased disparity and class separation. And then there are those artists whose work in abstraction intersects with a broader cultural conversation via the exploration of objects, form, materials, space, and the relationship between the art and the viewer.

Erika Vogt is an artist who abstractly burrows into her subject, imagining how an object might change, mutate, and take on a personality and function other than its prescription. Her work invites us to expand our immediate notions of what an object is as it functions within space. In Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll, for example, we become active participants in Vogt’s mixed-media pulley-system drawing.

Among other things, Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll can abstractly confront our systems of thought and experience, echoing our culture-wide questioning of restraining structures that have been and that are. Vogt elegantly and playfully pushes boundaries as much as she creates her own, and through this, she offers us the opportunity to find both personal and cultural senses of awareness and expansion.

The exhibition is on view until September 22, 2013, at the New Museum in New York City. All images are used with the permission of the New Museum.

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About the Authors

Erika Vogt
Erika Vogt received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Vogt has had solo exhibitions at Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles, and Simone Subal Gallery, New York. Her work has been included in a number of group exhibitions at such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (as part of 2010, the 75th Whitney Biennial); Foam, Amsterdam, Netherlands; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Oregon; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (as part of the Los Angeles biennial Made in L.A. 2012). She lives and works in Los Angeles, California; this is her first solo museum exhibition.

Jen Grabarczyk-Turner
Jen Grabarczyk-Turner is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Corpus Christi, Texas. She holds an MFA in studio art from Claremont Graduate University and an MA in theology and culture from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. She is currently transitioning away from her position as art editor for The Other Journal to return to her work in the studio.