Evergreene would like to announce its inaugural exhibition of works by Alexandra Vogt.  This is Vogt’s first solo exhibition at Evergreene and it includes a series of photographs and light boxes.

Alexandra Vogt born in Germany in 1970 currently works and lives at the former manor of the Englisschem fraulein in Mindelheim, Bavaria, being the primary mise en scène for her photography.

RIDE ON centers on the photographs and light boxes of several protagonists: Vogt’s own Arab horses; young stable girls on the brink of adolescence, and male onlookers in the guise of a farm manager and landlord.

Vogt creates a paradoxical environment by balancing two recurring aesthetics in her work; the aura of a fairytale combined with a straightforward photographic representation of a daily life in a stable in the Bavarian country side: A lady Godiva figure “Eva” on her white horse appears wraith like and fantastical, and then she portrays plainly as her other self, a pubescent, distracted girl, going about her daily chores in the stables.

The farm where Alexandra Vogt stables her own horses is both her reality and her mise–en-scène, inevitably the farm provides a platform for a horse cult, a place where young girls enact the ritual of grooming, while being caught up in a fantasy world, away from home and from school, the stables offers an adolescent promise of freedom, a floating condition between normalcy and dreams, security and thirst for change and adventure.

The emotional emphasis of grooming and dressing of horses is manifested in scattered details, artfully chosen to convey both naturalness and artificiality, distracting the viewer from any specific trauma: dirt, dung, hay, blood, cuts and scrapes are all part of everyday farm life, but are being used to underpin the aura of mystery and discomfort inherent in Vogt’s work. Further the excessive corporeality of the horses conjures moments of uncertainty, physically large and clumsy in their often confined space  or situation.

Throughout the project the artist acts as a stage manager, she surrounds herself with the conventionality and daily madness of parochial life in the Bavarian countryside.  Young girls fulfilling their dreams, playing with horses, brushing them, dressing them, caressing them, while all the time in the shadows, we are aware of a voyeuristic presence, a figure, watching, waiting, participating.