ANDY VOGT
Submerged on the Surface

Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Andy Vogt, Submerged on the Surface.

Based on the sculptural potential of lumberyard detritus and repurposed rough-cut Douglas Fir lath, Vogt uses additive and reductive approaches to delineate the facets of raw material. His vision of well-worn, structural demise finds a language in the crisp edges and broken off-cuts of discarded plywood and lath and their shadows.

The artist will transform the gallery space producing a mixture of site specific installation, sculpture and drawing using his found palette of materials. Here, shadows become plans for sculptures and edges of lath emerge as a drawing medium in works that blur the ephemeral and permanent.

“Vogt’s lath works combine the dumpster and blueprint, the geological and the architectural, merging manmade and natural environments.” – DeWitt Cheng

Vogt earned a BFA in Intermedia, focusing on time-based media, performance and installation, from Carnegie Mellon University. He has exhibited numerous times in the Bay Area, including at The Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco Arts Commission, Southern Exposure, Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco State University, UC Davis Memorial Union Art Gallery, and The Luggage Store. Andy Vogt lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

San Francisco artist creates visual 
puzzles from scavenged materials

Examiner.com

May 21, 2013

by Dewitt Cheng

Digital technology, for all its ubiquity, can be overrated. The San Francisco artist Andy Vogt has made a specialty of working—along with high-tech materials like dichroic glass—with the unsung material of redwood lath, once ubiquitous (hidden beneath coats of plaster) in San Francisco Victorians, and now re-emerging into the light of day, as construction debris. In his 2D wall reliefs and 3D sculptures and installations, Vogt cuts and arranges the lath to suggest planes, screens and fences, or stick-frame houses, but eroded, and fragmented by time. (Shadows and other imprints are also included or implied.) These postminimalist abstractions borrow their forms from earlier works by Josef Albers, Al Held, Frank Stella, and Ronald Davis that also oscillated between 2D and 3D readings, flat patterns and objects in depth, but Vogt infuses his stripes and planes with a sense of time and decay. Part of the mystique of these and other process-based artworks derives from how they were created: how the materials led, via the artist’s process to these particular solutions.

Boundary Lines, at San Francisco’s Eli Ridgway Gallery through June 22, features nineteen pieces: eight rectangular-format framed wall pieces on paper or panel, employing plaster, steel, melamine plastic, graphite powder, and black gesso; seven irregularly shaped lath wall reliefs; and four sculptures or room installations. Among the 2D framed assemblage ‘drawings’ (for lack of a better term) are “Corner Work” and “Forming in the Wall,” gray rectangles of graphite-powder-tinted plaster, atmospheric-looking and painterly, atop which are displayed jagged-edged lath structures, either off-white or black, as scavenged; both strongly imply enigmatic archaeological fragments partially excavated from a matrix of soil or stone. Breaking from the rectangular enclosure are the wall reliefs, “Light Study 1” and “Light Study 2,” flat assemblages that imitate renderings of shelves or crates in perspective depth, replete with fake shadows of darker wood; “OSB (original strong block)” an arrangement of laminated, ragged wood pieces that suggests Roy Lichtenstein’s mock-expressionist Pop brushstroke paintings; and “Walls,” a flat wall relief that depicts, in orthogonal perspective, an eroded grid of egg-carton enclosures. Vogt’s sculptures and installations similarly play with perception and codes of representation: the conic form of “Visible Spectrum” refers to the optical cone of vision, while the lath forms of different lengths simulate light rays; the mullioned windowlike shape of “Shadeshape 3” with its hatched ‘shadows’ derives from traced shadows on Vogt’s studio floor, probably, but here the schematized window, leaning against the wall, casts secondary shadows; “Altered Mirror,” a sheet of Plexiglas that has been mirrored in stripes like those in “Shadeshape 3,” becomes itself a generator of form (though in reverse, with light and dark transposed) when struck by the beam from a theatrical spotlight.

Floor-to-ceiling Vogt

San Francisco Chronicle
June 15, 2013
by Kenneth Baker 

Bay Area artist Andy Vogt has a strange and involving solo exhibition at Eli Ridgway. It includes a delicate wood structure hanging like inverted rafters from a suspended light fixture, wall and floor pieces made from salvaged lath and other wood elements, drawings in "black gesso" and a hand-altered mirror spotlighted so that, jewel-like, it casts patterned reflections on the wall supporting it.

At points Vogt seems fascinated by orthogonal perspective, the type of non-diminishing spatial illusion used to describe architecture in antique Asian and pre-Renaissance European art. The historical echoes apparently matter less to him than a play between material and perceived structures.

"Light Study 1" (2013), hanging frameless on the wall, reads as an image of light and shadow falling on a slender, open, broken strut work of wood laths. Light does fall on the piece from a ceiling fixture, but the illusionistic shadows in the piece are actually dark-hued parts of the wood mosaic that give the piece its form. Call it wall relief marquetry.

Vogt looks for ways to maximize tension in his work between manifest simplicity and complexity of experience: just try describing what you see happening in any one of them. 

Through all of Vogt's work here runs a low-temperature critique of the aesthetic standoff between art tendencies - call them constructivist and post-minimalist, if you like - that respectively prize structure over content and process as the true genesis of meaning and value.