B. J. VOGT  |  EBB & FLOW

Gallery Installation
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 16, 7pm, KIAC Ballroom
Reception to follow in the ODD Gallery

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ARTIST STATEMENT

Our influence over the natural world, and the impact this influence in turn exerts upon human civilization, makes readily apparent that we are, in fact, part of an ongoing natural process in which both choice and chance determine the outcome. It is relevant therefore to propose that humans exist as a natural event unfolding within the evolutionary timeline of the Earth.

Through the creation of photographic images, sculpture, and video based works that manipulate manufactured environments in order to mimic naturally occurring landforms and events, I call into question the definition of the terms ‘man-made’ and ‘natural’. While concepts of permanence and perfection have long been the bench mark for defining the division of these two supposedly different types of entities, it is within their ever changing and imperfect evolutions that I find the substance for drawing conceptual parallels between them.

The focus of the work in Ebb and Flow is to investigate some of the various fluid states of human culture and its by-products in comparison to naturally occurring objects, systems, and events; especially the mechanisms of rivers, glaciers, and igneous rock formation. It is hard to conceive of within the daily human timeframe the scope of impact that we as a collective organism have affected upon the landscape. However when the duration of certain events and processes are sped up, slowed down, or frozen in time; our impressions become more evident. Through their collective forms the works created for this exhibition consolidate or expand the minutia of everyday life into gently manipulated representations of dynamic natural processes and systems.

BIOGRAPHY

B.J. Vogt lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, USA where he received a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Sculpture in 2006 from Washington University. Vogt has been the recipient of a Critical Mass for the Arts Creative Stimulus grant, a Santo Foundation  Individual Artist award and, in conjunction with a residency at the Cite’ Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, the 2006 Bill Kohn Travel Scholarship from Washington University in St. Louis. His work is currently featured in the Urbanity exhibition at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the 2011 Creative Stimulus Award exhibition: Anomalous Perspectives at the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis, Missouri.