Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum 

Santa Barbara, California, 

1981

Curator: David Trowbridge

 

exhibited also at the:

Atholl McBean Gallery of the San Francisco Art Institute, 

San Francisco, 

1982

Copenhagen Contemporary,

Copenhagen, Denmark,

2021-2022

 

6,2 ft x 18 inches x 2 inches

450 tiny bronze bricks (1 x 3 inch)

 

WoMan and Companion in White Tent: En Route to Mt. Analogue is a bronze sculpture in the form of a rectangle about six feet high and eighteen inches wide, yet only one inch thick. It is made of 450 tiny bronze bricks (1 x 3 inch), their surfaces shimmering in the light with gradations of burnished and polished patinas. About four inches down from the top there was what could be referred to as an eye slot.  Vogel created this work in 1981 when she was commissioned for a solo show at the newly formed Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. The piece has been fabricated with technical assistance of Jack Brogan. The work is not only the solitude monolith, but the monolith in the space - “It is the emptiness of the gallery which makes the strongest immediate impression” - noted Richarad Adams in his review of the exhibition.

This tall bronze, thin, symbolic figure represents the many self the artist went through/discovered when she became a mother. It’s worth noting that it was the first permanent work created by Vogel. All former works were of impermanent nature, however after she had her baby, she thought “it was so nice to have him around all the time”, so she decided to start creating permanent sculptures. As a result she created a bronze column-like structure which was permanent and stable but also flexible as it leaned slightly back and forth, just like herself as a woman, who’s a mother and an artist, carer and creator. Jan Butterfield when writing about that piece argued that “this was not an easy undertaking at a time when personal content in art was still taboo and women's struggles made a great subject for feminist articles but were not yet that acceptable in the art -world mainstream.”

The title of the work is an allusion to artist herself (WoMan), her inner-self(Companion) and her environment (White Tent),  it also refers very directly to a novel of French spiritual para-surrealist writer and pataphysist René Daumal (En Route to Mt. Analogue). The novel tells the story of an expedition to a mythical mountain. The mountain must exist on a hidden continent made entirely imperceptible to the rest of the world by the gravitational anomaly caused by the mountain's mass, which bends light and all other signals around it. The continent can only be perceived or accessed in any way from a precise location when rays of sunlight hit the earth at a certain angle - “The door to the invisible must be visible" - states Daumal.