May 17 – June 22, 2025
Ellen Vogel’s artworks amplify the tactile: layering cardboard with cut and torn papers, paint, wires, etc. For the series, Vogel was inspired by the concept of umwelt. Umwelt is a name for the small subset of the world each species detects and navigates, clearly different for all of us. The limited Umwelt of our own species is also the reason we sometimes mistake our own experience for all there is to know.
Vogel’s experience and understanding of the world, our umwelt, is heightened by touching the world’s layers of texture, density, lightness, weight, roughness, softness. In artmaking, she searches for wordless expressions for this tactility and expressions for the layered and multi-levels of consciousness.
She says: I work with piles of things. I just go, just respond. These pieces are visual poems; like musical compositions they are physical and wordless. They reflect layers of consciousness understood in visceral response. Corporeality and spirit combined.
