Patrick Vogel is an artist based in Los Angeles. Born in West Hollywood, he grew up acting on film sets and learned to transpose that collaborative spirit to his multidisciplinary path as a visual artist. Through sculpture, drawing, installation, and painting, he explores the inner and outer conditions of exhibition making in the twenty-first century.
Patrick’s transdisciplinary approach is unique, reflective of a conceptual practice grounded in site-specific research, happenstance, and an expanded art historical paradigm. His practice reveals power structures formed by particular stories that we tell ourselves, namely of imperialism, colonialism, and race prejudice, and the lethal epistemes branching out of them. His most recent work, the Hermit Series, takes on Roman and Gothic architectural forms, overlaid with photographs of palaces and royal doorways, which are then digitally carved, painted, and printed onto mirrors. Throughout, he deploys gesture and abstraction to produce an architectural palimpsest, a relic covered in futuristic cave paintings, which interrupts a clean reading of Western ideology as neutral, invisible, or inherent.
Patrick has traveled, taught, and lived across six continents. He received his BFA from Oregon Center for the Arts in Ashland, Oregon, and his MFA in art and technology from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. He has been an artist-in-residence at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Vermont Studio Center.
For his Fulbright-Nehru project, Patrick is studying British colonial architecture and native Indian architecture in Bengaluru, and developing a new series of installations in response. Through research and dialogue, he seeks to understand the varied epistemologies that became constructed public spaces in Bengaluru, spaces that owe its origins to different continents and cultures entirely. Through this project, he hopes for a broader perspective on global communities, how they interact, affect one another, and hybridize over time, and how we might, with clarity and focus, produce different spaces to better navigate the coming centuries. As part of the project, he is also a visiting artist-professor at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, where he is engaging with BFA/MA students in the Contemporary Art Practice program.