Amy Trachtenberg and Andy Vogt 500 Capp Street Opening Celebration: Abstract Objects of Devotion and The Ringing in My Eyes

Public Opening

Saturday, July 25 2026

5-8 PM with Artist Remarks at 7 PM

Abstract Objects of Devotion 

by San Francisco-based artist 

Amy Trachtenberg

500 Capp Street Foundation is pleased to present Abstract Objects of Devotion, a solo exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Amy Trachtenberg.

Spanning sculpture, painting, installation, and language the exhibition unfolds through a series of intimate gestures and spatial propositions developed in dialogue with David Ireland’s former home and studio. Returning to a decades-long exchange with Ireland that began in the late 1980s, Trachtenberg approaches the house not simply as a site of exhibition, but as a living structure of memory, friendship, transmission, and reflection.

“The house is a refuge, a studio, a lab, a depot, an invitation, a magnet, a tuning fork, a plinth, a lookout, a lighthouse.” — Amy Trachtenberg

Across the exhibition, folded and crumpled steel mesh and linen structures, silver pigment, ochre soil, human hair, bronze casts, poems, and archival correspondence become carriers of duration and attention. Each piece unfolds less as a fixed object than as a site of conversation: part poem, part proposition, part accumulated trace. Throughout the exhibition, materials gather into arrangements that resemble forms of concrete poetry assembled across space.

The exhibition also revisits the long correspondence between Trachtenberg and Ireland: letters, postcards, aerogrammes, collages, observations, and exchanges that unfolded over decades between artists deeply invested in material thinking and everyday transformation. Their friendship forms an underlying architecture throughout the exhibition.

Trachtenberg’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, collage, sculpture, installation, language, public commissions, theater and dance design in collaborative works. Her hybrid approach explores the emotional, political, and perceptual charge embedded within materials and the experience between objects, space, and memory.

Exhibition catalogue forthcoming with text by Jarrett Earnest.

Amy Trachtenberg’s work has been exhibited at BAMPFA, Contemporary Jewish Museum, The Luggage Store, The San José Museum of Art, and The Crocker Museum, and is held in public collections including BAMPFA, The San José Museum of Art, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Crocker Museum, The Haitian Embassy in Paris, and The De Menil Collection. Site-specific installations include the 1000’ long platform of the Milpitas BART station, the façade of the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco, Montalvo Arts Center and Hillview Branch Library in San Jose. She is represented in San Francisco by Catharine Clark Gallery. Trachtenberg received a BA in French and Liberal Studies from CSU Sonoma and the Diplôme des Arts Plastiques from L’Ecole Nationale Superièure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where she lived for six years. She is based in San Francisco.

This exhibition is part of 500 Capp Street’s evolving program supporting artist-driven experimentation, made possible in part through support from the Teiger Foundation.

 https://500cappstreet.org/abstract-objects-of-devotion/

The Ringing in My Eyes 

by San Francisco-based artist 

Andy Vogt

500 Capp Street Foundation is pleased to present The Ringing in My Eyes, an exhibition of new sculptures and site-responsive installations by San Francisco-based artist Andy Vogt.

Working with salvaged architectural materials collected over decades from Bay Area demolition sites, Vogt constructs environments that dwell between structure and sensation. Throughout the house, light, reflection, and optical vibration will highlight areas in the space with a focused visual resonance, perceptual drift, and implied spatial memory.

Installed across intimate areas of David Ireland’s former home and studio, the exhibition unfolds through subtle interventions: concrete forms, mirrored surfaces, salvaged wood lath, reflected light, and suspended linear structures that appear to register frequencies moving through the architecture itself. Walls, apertures and existing traces within the house become active participants in the work.

Vogt’s practice emerges from an expansive material history shaped by his use of photography, woodworking, installation, prop and architectural model making and Bay Area artist-run culture. Since the early 2000s, he has developed a sculptural language grounded in reclamation, reuse, improvisation, and careful observation of the built environment.

Rather than occupying the house, The Ringing in My Eyes listens to it, treating the architecture as a resonant body that holds fossilized evidence of vibrations, reflections, memory, and duration.

Andy Vogt (b. 1970, Washington D.C.) lives and works in San Francisco. He received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, studying performance and time-based media. His work spans sculpture, installation, photography, and public art, often utilizing salvaged architectural materials gathered from Bay Area demolition sites over the last twenty-five years. Vogt has exhibited at the Museum of Craft and Design, Southern Exposure, Headlands Center for the Arts, and SFMOMA’s Artists Gallery, among others, and has realized major public and architectural commissions including projects for San Francisco International Airport and Texas A&M University. 

This exhibition is part of 500 Capp Street’s evolving program supporting artist-driven experimentation, made possible in part through support from the Teiger Foundation.

https://500cappstreet.org/the-ringing-in-my-eyes/