Blind Hierarchies, Tegeder’s exhibition with Johannes Vogt Gallery in New York City, featured four iterations of a site-specific installation of works on paper, sculptures, paintings and wall drawings. Tegeder continued her exploration of architecture and abstraction in tandem with her interest and involvement in conceptual poetry as expressed in her long, elaborate work titles that serve as an oblique legend to the cosmology drafted by and inherent in Tegeder’s oeuvre.

With “Blind Hierarchies,” Tegeder envisioned an exhibition in flux: she chose not to hang her framed drawings and paintings statically on the wall, as they have previously been presented. Instead, they were placed on a series of carved wooden pedestals whose geometric forms echoed Brancusi’s sculptural displays while their shapes were derived from the artist’s drawing practice. Every week over the course of the exhibition, Tegeder reinstalled these in a new configuration, placing her work further in dialogue with experimental exhibition design and display strategies of the early twentieth century. She created a sense of the gallery as a stage set— reinforced by the prop-like components of the installation— and, in doing so, invited viewers to rethink the ways they 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 envisioned systems inspired, both formally and in conceptual approach, by the utopian impulse of the Constructivists. She employed 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 were hand-drafted, without the slick impenetrability of technologically rendered plans. The evidence of the artist’s hand, with its occasionally visible hesitations, transformed Tegeder’s schematic drawings into what she calls “humanized machines,” in which existing forms coincide with possible futures.

Her utopian systems were not self-contained, but instead spilled out of their frames and boundaries, engaging with the architectural spaces they inhabited. In the exhibition, her works on paper were presented alongside a new installation comprising a variety of site-specific objects and materials. These included 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 drew 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.

-Press Release by Johannes Vogt Gallery

Click here to listen to a talk about the exhibition here.

“Artist Peter Halley and critic Barry Schwabsky have both done rehangings of the show, and surprises continue through the final weekend. Unaltered, however, are the show’s basic elements: linear abstractions on paper, canvas, and wall, plus Brancusi-inspired sculptural pieces that sometimes prop up the framed works (which may lean against but never hang on the walls). “

—Richard Vine for Art in America