Swarm Gallery at
AQUA HOTEL Rm# 109 | Miami
December 4-7, 2008

Preview | Wednesday, Dec. 3, 7-10PM

Public Hours:
Dec. 4: 11am - 8pm
Dec. 5: 11am - 8pm
Dec. 6: 11am - 8pm
Dec. 7: 11am - 4pm

PREVIEW SELECT WORKS - Sarah Smith & Andy Vogt

EVERYTHING TAKES ITS TOLL ON EVERYTHING
a collaborative pairing of works by Sarah Smith and Andy Vogt

Andy grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC, the son of a compulsive dumpster diving filmmaker. He moved to SF during the height of the dotcom boom (2000) and was inspired by the wave of detritus produced by fervent home renovation. The hundreds of debris boxes that populated city streets were overflowing with remnants of Victorian era construction material, including plaster lath, the wood strips embedded beneath old plaster walls. As San Francisco's residential, commercial (and cultural) exfoliation fell to the mercy of the new economy, Andy was moved to repurpose the old bones of these buildings and discover new structural forms. Andy's most recent work includes drawings on paper that play on similar ideas as his sculpture.

Sarah's fascination with antique objects and the look of old things has led to a series of drawings which present themselves like slowly disintegrating gilded memories. She works with composite gold leaf on paper and deliberately corrodes the shiny surface of the gold with a corrosive acid wash. Her compositions unfold like mythical landscapes where sick, dying or dead animals act like the protagonists in a fragmented, out of scale world of shrinking natural habitats. Sarah is haunted in her dreams by dead pets, which take a symbolic role as eagles and wolves in her drawings. Decorative Baroque-style scrolls and flourishes, juxtaposed with a dying landscape, instigate an out of balance, off-kilter feeling.

For these drawings, Sarah uses the composite gold leaf as the element to reflect our materially excessive times back at us. She takes that concept one step further by adding a layer of instant decay with a real chemical process the corrodes the gold. Her intention is to convey that we have entered an era of loss and the time in which we inhabit has taken its toll on the natural world.

Together these artists investigate a world where everything takes its toll on everything, an idea that informs this collaborative installation at Aqua.

PREVIEW SELECT WORKS ON PAPER - Gallery Artists