“Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll” will be the first solo museum presentation of the work of Erika Vogt.

Vogt uses a range of media and techniques in order to explore the mutability of images and objects. Within her installations, she fuses elements of sculpture, drawing, video, and photography to produce multilayered image spaces. She challenges prescribed art-making systems, conflating and confusing their logic, as sculptures take on the properties of drawing and photographs take on the nature of film. Building on her background in experimental filmmaking, Vogt’s visually dense videos combine both still and moving images, digital and analog technologies, and playfully incorporate drawings and objects from her previous projects. In her recent work, exemplified by installations such as Notes on Currency (2012), The Engraved Plane (2012), and Grounds and Airs (2012), Vogt took as her subject the ritual use and exchange of objects, such as currency, and investigated the empathetic relationship between objects and people.

At the New Museum, Vogt will continue this recent investigation in a new installation for the Lobby Gallery, entitled Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll (2013). For this work, the artist will compose a dense arrangement of cast plaster and found objects that float in the gallery space like a field of debris. Some of the littered forms suggest cast-off relics; others evoke tools of an indeterminate functionality. A series of vertically aligned pulleys levitate these sculptural forms above the floor, demarcating the gallery space as a volumetric drawing through which the viewer can navigate. Included within this surreal landscape are three of Vogt’s most recent videos, in which objects are exchanged. Graphic aspects of the videos are echoed in the installation itself, creating a tension between the objects and images on screen and their deployment as physical presences within the space of the gallery.