Artist’s Statement
My practice centers on materials initially shaped by their utility—three-dimensional industrial artifacts that I incorporate sculpturally, and two-dimensional printed documents that I incorporate photographically. The sculptural materials include hangers, eyeglass lenses, and cheese graters. The documents include legal records, handwritten French contracts, and typewritten pages. In both cases, light plays an essential and active role; but in my sculptures especially, I shape light just as deliberately as I shape form—treating it as an integral part of the overall composition.
In sculpture, I assemble these parts into illuminated structures where form and light take precedence over original use. In photography, I frame and transform fragments of text into visual fields where meaning gives way to composition, surface, and spatial arrangement. Both processes are a kind of reassembly: one in space, the other in image. What connects them is a shared intent—to invert the original hierarchy, where what was once secondary becomes primary, and to reveal the quiet aesthetics of lost utility.
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FroiDesign
FroiDesign is the foundational principle behind Sanford Kogan’s work in both sculpture and photography. The term stands for Found and Repurposed Objects of Industrial Design, but its meaning extends beyond material. It reflects a way of working: rooted in discovery, transformation, the reframing of what has been hiding in plain sight. The term also draws from the French word froid (meaning “cold”), invoking the metaphor of neglected materials — once inert or cast off, now reawakened through processes of transformation and discovery.
In sculpture, FroiDesign begins with industrial remnants — selected, rearranged, and assembled to uncover an underlying visual order not evident in their original state.
In photography, FroiDesign engages with textual fragments — documents once bound by meaning, now restructured into compositions where visual order displaces interpretation.
What unites these practices is FroiDesign itself: a quiet insistence that beauty can be coaxed from what has been discarded, misunderstood, or ignored.