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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