installation view of 'redensified',
solo exhibition at ampersand - 2006
salvaged wood

Andy Vogt
"Lath Dispersion"
salvaged wood
48" x 9", 2006

Andy Vogt
"Inside the Mountain"
salvaged wood
11" x 19", 2006

Andy Vogt
"Hyperreal Territory"
salvaged wood
46" x 19", 2005

Statement
All objects have a beginning and an end, at least when it comes to our economic value system. Objects allude to reference points in the built landscape, our own reality, and we reinforce this structural vernacular on many levels from the cubes that we live in to what we imagine a fence "means". Our burning need to make order out of chaos subsides only briefly before our true entropic nature overrides us and trashes it all.

Mining San Francisco's dumpsters I salvage wood strips of plaster lath discarded during home renovation projects and re-assemble them into geometric wall drawings and structures. I see these works as re-crystallized skeletal incarnations of an obsoleted system that has been frozen in suspended animation. Their shapes have a hazy connection to literal structures but subscribe to alternate formal hierarchies.

The materials are what have driven this body of work. Their history, both natural and as a building material, form the basis of their re-use.

Bio
Andy Vogt completed a BFA in Intermedia at Carnegie Mellon University; a program focused on time based media, performance and installation. Vogt is a founding member of Operation Re-Information (O.R.I.), a science+information / art performance collective that champions "the repurposing of existing information and the resultant product: reinformation." Throughout the 1990's O.R.I. toured nationally, recorded several cds and developed its own performance software. (www.reinformation.com) Andy Vogt's current three-dimensional artwork explores again "repurposing"; through the reinterpretation of wooden structural remnants salvaged from dumpsters around San Francisco. Andy Vogt's artwork has been exhibited in San Francisco at Southern Exposure, ampersand international arts, Pigman Gallery in "Paper! Awesome!", Mimi Barr Gallery, The Lab, Blue Sky Studios, The Build, New Langton and at the Michelle O'Connor Gallery, the UC Davis Memorial Union Gallery in Davis, CA. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Vogt has exhibited at The Skinny Building and Pittsburgh Filmmakers. Andy Vogt presently lives and works in San Francisco.