Frank Vega (b. 1992, Ecuador) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, painting, sound, and installation. His practice examines the material and symbolic value of everyday objects through Desencanto—a process of deconstruction and reconfiguration that challenges systems of utility and value. By stripping objects of their original function and activating them through sound, movement, and collaboration, Vega opens new possibilities for meaning, sustainability, and co-creation. His work explores how materials absorb collective memory and cultural identity.

Merging tradition processes, natural materials, and discarded objects through improvisation and play, Vega redefines how audiences can engage with materiality and a collective experience, forging new relationships between the materials we own, the histories we carry, and the communities we inhabit.

Vega has exhibited at Facultad de Artes Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombian), No Luga (Ecuador), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Devening Projects (Chicago), MDW Fair at Mana Contemporary (Chicago), Koik Contemporary (Mexico City), The Green Gallery (Milwaukee), El Lobi (Puerto Rico), among others. He has been awarded a Individual Artists Grant Program (IAP) from DCASE, Teaching Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as the Frankenthaler Scholarship, the Florence M. House Scholarship, and the Leroy Neiman Fellowship from Ox-Bow School of Art.

Statement

Through various presentational strategies that explore the relationship between objects and space, I help craft narratives that challenge collective perceptions of presence, meaning, and belonging. My work spans diverse modes of study to reconfigure established value systems, transforming them into spaces of renewable potential, collaboration, memory, and care. Discarded materials along side other categories help embrace the inevitability of change of design and deterioration.

At the core of my practice lies the concepts that serve as points of departure, Desencanto, Tuneado Urbano, and Unidad. For an object to undergo transformation, it must first be broken, disassembled, or flipped, thereby liberating it from its original function and form.