Fine Art Gallery 

University of California,Irvine 

Curated by Melinda Wortz

1979-80

 

Peach pastel blocks, lead bricks, drawings on paper, human body, graphite, sound

 

Point Conception, Lead Barrier Reef and Leadwall/Wishing Well was a complex environmental piece created by the artist for the purposes of exhibition at the Fine Art Gallery of the University of California in Irvine. The show was curated by Melind Wortz. It consisted of three installations - in the lobby there was a cubic shaped wall constructed of lead bricks titled Leadwall or Wishing Well, in the next room one could see drawings of peach bricks and in the main exhibition space Vogel constructed a monumental installation titled Point Conception. 

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Point Conception was a site-specific installation that paired a chest-high wall constructed of peach pastel blocks, with a low wall comprising inordinately heavy lead bricks (thirty pounds each), that were used as a radiation protection or as ballast on ships. The two walls ran  parallel to each other for thirty feet. Peter Clothier said of it: “We're presented, then, with two horizons - or, rather two thresholds - which invite our eyes to penetrate the ambient light and space beyond them.”

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By the time of creating the show Vogel was pregnant with her only child Rio. The title of the work directly refers to the act of conscious conception undertaken by the artist a few months earlier: “I conceived  under the dappled trees to the sound of the breeze, with the sound of the stream and the sunlight pouring through the leaves. I wanted  to hold onto  that whole feeling, that sensibility…”

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Peach pastel wall, dissolving in the golden light, brought an association with soft baby skin. In that sense Point Conception was not only about creating a work of art, but about creating a human being. Being pregnant and the experience of motherhood become crucial motives of her later works and the point conception made her son to be considered as her opus magnum. 

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In order to emphasize acts of building/creating the space, the shelt, protections and limitations, but building of life and body, she incorporated a feminin culturist Lisa Lyon to perform during the show. Lyon­, clothed only in dull silvery graphite, slowly performed a posed piece in front of Vogel's walls. In the performance Richard Keeling played a seventeenth-century Japanese flute piece by Kurasawa Kinko. Vogel described Lisa Lyon as  “perfect representation of beauty in the female form” and noted that "the whole physical world is our bodies." 

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