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.

Each element, a fragment can build una unidad (Unit)—where parts come together to form a greater whole, a space for belonging. Merging tradition processes, natural materials, and discarded objects through improvisation and play, Vega redefines how audiences can engage with materiality and collective experience, forging new relationships between the objects 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 craft narratives that challenge collective perceptions of presence, meaning, and belonging. My work spans diverse modes of operation to reconfigure established value systems, transforming them into spaces of renewable potential, collaboration, memory, and care. Discarded materials along side charged objects shift their temporal notions of what we can preserve, while embracing the inevitability of change.

At the core of my practice lies the concept of Desencanto, for an object to undergo transformation, it must first be broken, disassembled, or flipped, thereby liberating it from its original function and form.