Yours to Discover

In his exhibition Yours to Discover, Dan Vogt continues his research into the notion of home, which he began in 2018 with the show Home Movies at Main Street, Toronto. In the first room of the gallery one can see sun-bleached advertisements sparsely covered with floss and hair, and mounted on boards. These posters, originating from different North American and European cities, have become obsolete due to aging, and now stand as a testament for the time elapsed since the start of their decay. (And what is decay, but the passing of time?) In the second room one can see several freestanding wall-structures. These sculptures, comprised of neutrally painted surfaces and a baseboard, address one of the fundamental functions of walls—their capacity to contain space. In everyday life walls might appear two-dimensional, yet by extracting only a very small portion of them, Vogt is able to address them as independent objects and not only as backdrops for what happens within them. For Dan Vogt, home is a place where time moves at a slow and sporadic pace. Objects standing around the house gradually cease to belong to the present moment, and bear witness to the irregular and stifled time flow instead. These personally loaded items tell a family-specific story, yet with time and (involuntary) abandonment they become almost universally faded and still. In his practice, Vogt attempts to explore the feeling of nostalgia embedded in the stuff at home, however by paying great care to maintain a distanced and generalized approach to the topic and not to make it unnecessarily cheesy. Because there is a certain finitude to the passage of time that leaves little space for feelings—be it good or bad. – Julija Zaharijević