How are we embedded and implicated in our environment, as subjective bodies that have emerged from, are contingent upon and actors within complex organic and inorganic material systems? How do we remember that we are animals among animals, woven into the fabric of the living world? The questions that drive my work are long-standing, but my practice and the ways that I wrestle with those questions has evolved substantially.
Drawing – sometimes visible, sometimes not – is the animating force of my work. Paper either serves as the ground for drawing or it becomes the line itself through hand cutting. I treat the paper before I begin working, either by printing photographic images or applying color fields (watercolor or acrylic). Ink drawings either appear on top of printed images or happen on the back of the paper to guide the cutting. The net - this flexible, shape-shifting grid loaded with complicated associations - has given me a structure and process for enacting and imagining change, porosity and entanglement. I work with the net in a range of scales and contexts simultaneously. I am endlessly interested in the way an unpredetermined field or form emerges gradually and surprisingly from many simple decisions and actions. Spatially, the net always feels like magic – stretchy, malleable, unpredictable.
In big projects like ‘Forcefield’ and ‘Superorganism’, the uncanny result is a composite of different registers - in the paper, the cut net structure generated by drawing and carving away at the image (dog fur) from the back; on the surface of the paper, the remaining fragments of the image and behind the paper, colored light reflecting onto the wall from paint on the back of the paper. Alongside these large cut pieces, I am also making smaller pieces where the drawing sits on top and disrupts the printed image, often expansive spaces like the horizonless skies in ‘Shimmer’ or ‘Loom’.
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Vandenburgh’s drawing-based work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Toronto, Montreal, Hamburg, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, including venues such as the Kunstverein Passau; Hilde Leiss Gallery; Upfor Gallery; Susan Hobbs Gallery; Hunterdon Art Museum; Ditch Projects; the Portland Art Museum; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center; the Everson Museum; Hunter College; Lawrence University and Syracuse University. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in publications including Hyperallergic, Art LTD and Canadian Art. Vandenburgh’s studio practice has been supported by residencies and awards from Yaddo, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, and the Ragdale Foundation. She received her MFA from Hunter College in New York City, following a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree and BS in Zoology from the University of California at Davis. Vandenburgh lives in Springfield and is a professor of Art at the University of Oregon.