Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Erika Vogt’s interdisciplinary installation, Secret Traveler Navigator, which premiered at the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Opening Reception Thursday, September 30, 6-9 pm September 30 – November 20, 2010
The work’s main component is a film that blurs the boundaries between what Peter Wollen designated as the narrative and structuralist historical avant-gardes. In so doing, the work begs the question: what is a narrative? And, by extension, what is a journey?
Structurally, the film is an episodic narrative, wherein different scenes repeat similar abstract images or specific activities, while metaphorically it is also an abstract representation of a compass that’s been broken down into parts. After the viewer has navigated their journey through these abstract and real signs, a voiceover is heard: The narrator, a man of shimmering devices, has lost his way.
To go back or forward? Obtuse in storyline but hypnotic in visual affect, Vogt’s Secret Traveler Navigator is a mediation on what Hollis Frampton asked at the height of 60’s experimental film: What are the irreducible axioms of that part of thought we call the art of film? This remains a pertinent question in contemporary art, one to which we can neither simply return nor abandon.
Curated by Juli Carson.
Room Gallery University of California, Irvine ACT rm. 1200 Irvine, CA 92697-2775
studioart.arts.uci.edu
