Anchoring S.O.S. is a series of works through which Vandenberg continues to explore her fascination with the iconography of identity. In Sink or Swim: Family Style (image), three life vests fashioned from salvaged American flags hang from a handmade wall-mount.

Repetition is a motif central to Vandenberg’s production. Recalling Gilles Deleuze’s pronouncement that only that which is alike differs, and only differences are alike, Vandenberg inserts selected symbols, such as stars or stripes, and certain texts, such as the word EXIT, within many of her works. Both the three-dimensional Clouds of Vertical Development , image hereunder - a hand-fabricated, multi-media three-dimensional Exit sign with an electrical cord tail - and EXIT, a collaged multi-media photograph from the artist’s Seen, Not Heard series, use a typographically similar text. It is almost as if Vandenberg has taken the negative space created by removing the term from the former and layered it over the latter creating an oscillating relationship between these two series.

It is this type of subtle understandings of the ways in which an artist can move within and between media that makes Vandenberg’s long history as a practitioner evident. Rather than be trapped within the confines of a medium for fear of stepping outside it, she is as comfortable within one as she is within another. She also revisits methods, but reinterprets their meanings. Drawing on the matchstick drawing methods of her late 1990’s series Match Drawings, Vandenberg is now producing new pieces which scorch paper, but she has turned towards the figurative, using many of the same icons that appear in her collages and three-dimensional works.

Vandenberg will also present a new performance, Zoetrope, that will expand on her recent project Sew to Speak. Performance is central to her practice, as is engagement through media including blogs and tumblr. In S.O.S. Vandenberg will re-contextualize our relationships with the mechanical and the machine, altering our understandings of both its uses and its values. As she explains, one of her hopes is to blur the boundaries between “private and public.” Perhaps then it will be time to send an S.O.S.