Marin Magazine - SPACES January 2017

Relatively recently, as a resident artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts and in his own studio in the Balboa Park neighborhood, Vogt has also explored ways to make three-dimensional objects and scaffolds that look like buildings just taking shape or being dismantled. They cast real shadows on a wall. “The shadows are also a drawing medium now,” Vogt says.

For one 2012 piece called “Altered Mirror,” he selectively stripped the silvered backing off an acrylic mirror so that when a light shines through the altered plane, it creates light “shadows” or patterns of light on the wall.

Prompted by an outdoor installation he did for the Museum of Craft and Design in the Dogpatch neighborhood, Vogt now sometimes builds latticed objects and places them in the sun on stretched fabric treated with light-sensi-tive dye, to fix the cast shadows onto the dyed fabric. These sun prints harken back to Anna Atkins’ cyanotype blueprints and latter-day Laszlo Moholy-Nagy darkroom photograms of the Bauhaus school in Germany; in Vogt’s versions, the sculptures’ shadows prevent the dye from adhering to the fabric, and the shadow areas remain white or lighter than the rest of the surface, which has been exposed to sunlight.

Vogt’s site-specific wall works include a mural for South Park Commons, a tech incubator. Cast-concrete tiles, formed with lath strips that remain impressed in the surface of the tile-like shadows, are new designs that can be installed outdoors.

All the works Vogt creates with lath represent upheaval and inevitable changes in the built landscape, which, “no matter how ephemeral it is, forms a palimpsest,” he says. “Those are my themes,” Vogt adds. “My structures are also transitory and merely shadows at play.” n