Erika Vogt
Image Blocker 6
Acrylic, linen, paper, thread, marker. 2024

A work from her recent exhibition “Image Blockers” at Overduin & Co "Image Blocker 6" hangs high on the wall in GODMODADOGGEREL, its specific design alluding both to a proto-technology and something more uncertain. Based on ancient Cycladic terra cotta artifacts sometimes known as "frying pans," due to their shape, the ambiguity of these historic objects reflects the artist's ongoing interest in tools and divination devices, where an object's form suggests a function as a transmitter or interface but whose interpretation remains open and perhaps unknowable. Vogt’s interest in time frames her most recent work with newspapers and other analog media, though her practice has long been characterized by an ongoing investigation of how technology shapes (and distorts) perception.

The historic Cycladic "frying pans" are etched with occult diagrams and other decorative motifs suggesting astronomical phenomena and are believed to have functioned as complex calendars although they may also have been mirrors. Interpreting these objects and their function as fundamentally one of recording time (as relics of another age) the devices also appear in a parallel series of videos where Vogt has incorporated 3D scans further blurring their legibility and ambiguous utility. These digital models and facsimiles of the form are the basis for her sculpture that uses paper and linen—suggesting an interstitial architecture—as well as forming a ground on which to present new inscriptions /drawings that the artist creates using a digital embroidery machine. Graphs and charts clipped from contemporary newspapers are scanned and then transcribed into thread into the object's paper front—the interface of the device—suggesting an echo of their original function.

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