Dannielle Tegeder

“Blind Hierarchies”

Nov. 17–Jan.9, 2017

Johannes Vogt Gallery is pleased to present “Blind Hierarchies,” the first solo exhibition with the gallery by New York–based artist Dannielle Tegeder who recently joined the roster of represented artists. Unprecedented in Tegeder’s work the show will feature four iterations of a site-specific installation of works on paper, sculptures, paintings and wall drawings. Tegeder continues her exploration of architecture and abstraction. The included works form a cosmology of sorts, a conceptual map to which their long, elaborate titles serve as an oblique legend.

With “Blind Hierarchies,” Tegeder has envisioned an exhibition in flux: she has chosen not to hang her framed drawings and paintings statically on the wall, as they have previously been presented. Instead, they are placed on a series of carved wooden pedestals whose geometric forms echo Brancusi’s sculptural displays while their shapes are derived from the artist’s drawing practice. Every week over the course of the exhibition, Tegeder will reinstall these in a new configuration, placing her work further in dialogue with experimental exhibition design and display strategies of the early twentieth century. She creates a sense of the gallery as a stage set— reinforced by the prop-like components of the installation—and, in doing so, invites viewers to rethink the ways we see and experience space.

Tegeder’s works on paper build on modernist legacies of abstract art, architectural draftsmanship, and city planning. In these drawings, rendered in a pared-down palette of neutral tones (black and white, grey and beige), Tegeder envisions systems inspired, both formally and in conceptual approach, by the utopian impulse of the Constructivists. She employs archaic architectural tools and methods—including techniques gleaned from her upbringing in a family of steamfitters—to conceptualize a form of urban planning only fully realizable, perhaps, in the imagination. Yet despite their architectural precision, the works on paper are hand-drafted, without the slick impenetrability of technologically rendered plans. The evidence of the artist’s hand, with its occasionally visible hesitations, transforms Tegeder’s schematic drawings into what she calls “humanized machines,” in which existing forms coincide with possible futures.

Trained as a painter, Tegeder has been making such large-scale drawings for over a decade, and in recent years has begun expanding her investigations of structure and vision into threedimensional space. Her utopian systems are not self-contained, but instead spill out of their frames and boundaries, engaging with the architectural spaces they inhabit. In the exhibition, her works on paper are presented alongside a new installation comprising a variety of site-specific objects and materials. These include layered bits of colored glass, which echo the starburst form that appears in several of the drawings, as well as wooden frames similar to those around the works on paper. Tegeder draws out the visual interplay between those works and the installation, developing the project of translation between media that has long been central to her practice.

DANNIELLE TEGEDER was born in Peekskill, NY, and lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include the Montclair Art Museum, NJ; and the Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton, NY. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; the New Museum, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and elsewhere. Tegeder’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC. She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Foundation Studio Fellowship, the Yaddo Foundation Residency, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation grant, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation grant. “Blind Hierarchies” is Tegeder’s first gallery solo show in New York in seven years.