Tegeder’s mobiles free her long-standing architectural language inspired by blueprints and mechanical drawings, introducing contingent symbols hung in a delicate, sculptural balance. In so doing, this work responds directly to architecture and ecology, freeing pictorial elements to communicate with other objects, ornaments, and design—capturing the invisible motion produced by passersby and indoor conditioning systems. Tegeder also departs from a parallel interest in cosmological systems as understood through celestial and occult methods for accessing the divine. The mobiles reference the form of witch ladders, folk magic objects meant to catch spells or negative energy. Straddling highly systematic architectural visualization and vernacular folk talismans, Tegeder also references histories absent from conventional narratives of high modernism: the women of the Bauhaus, for example, who explored controlled formalism and material experimentation through mobiles and toys, objects deeply related to lived experiences of childhood and motherhood, and the desire to stimulate play, learning, and utopian imaginaries. 

As ludic objects, the mobiles communicate with Tegeder’s new paintings, which refract her systems-thinking through games and play. The paintings incorporate the familiar aesthetic of board games by invoking the planned gameboards and rules that make possible collective world-building and competition, success and loss. Tegeder’s highly-structured process proceeds through its own strategies, in which each ‘move’ delimits the field of possibility and responds to internal pictorial logic in addition to enveloping architectural and urban systems. Equally influenced by hard-edged abstraction and the aesthetic history of divinatory tools, Tegeder incorporates the sensibility of avant-garde games throughout art history from surrealism to the French avant-garde literary experimentation of the Oulipo group. 

Freeing her typical architectural language from the picture plane, play animates this new body of work and allows Tegeder to reduce and expand, peeling symbols off the canvas and exploring interactions between space and structure.