Room Gallery continues its Emerging Artist Series with Erika Vogt’s interdisciplinary installation, Secret Traveler Navigator, which premiered at the 2010 Whitney Biennial.  The work’s main component is a film that blurs the boundaries between what Peter Wollen designated as the narrative and structuralist historical avant-gardes.  In so doing, the work begs the question: what is a narrative?  And, by extension, what is a journey?  Structurally, the film is an episodic narrative, wherein different scenes repeat similar abstract images or specific activities, while metaphorically it is also an abstract representation of a compass that’s been broken down into parts.  After the viewer has navigated their journey through these abstract and real signs, a voiceover is heard: The narrator, a man of shimmering devices, has lost his way.  To go back or forward?  Obtuse in storyline but hypnotic in visual affect, Vogt’s Secret Traveler Navigator is a mediation on what Hollis Frampton asked at the height of 60’s experimental film: What are the irreducible axioms of that part of thought we call the art of film?  This remains a pertinent question in contemporary art, one to which we can neither simply return nor abandon.  | Read Review