https://coprosperity.org/chicago/2024/12/6/entre-ritos-y-portales

Reflejos (Reflections), 2024

This is not an invented language; it is born of ritual. Ritual, as continuous practice, becomes a way of creating and inhabiting new realities—bridging past and present, object and action, sound and silence.

Shapes, portals, bodies, performance, all come together creating unified encounters.

In Quechua:  

Thread is language, weaving stories across time.  

Embroidery is conversation, stitching complexity into being.  

Echo is sound, resonating through space.

Reflejos (Reflections) explores the transformation of shapes, objects, and spaces through the interplay of sound, and performance. The ceramic forms serve as both vessels and instruments, activating presence through rhythm and movement.

Through the process of Desencanto, objects are stripped of their utilitarian purpose and imbued with new meaning. This rhythmic and physical reimagining reveals the intricate relationships between form, function, and meaning. How do we engage with objects once they’ve been reshaped and redefined? What truths can emerge from new transformations?

“It is through listening that transformation is possible.” —Pauline Oliveros

This project was produced during the No Lugar Residency Program and Sin Teatro in Quito, Ecuador, Summer, 2024.

The project concluded with an activation using sound objects created during the residency in collaboration with Taller La Bolla.

To listen to the full sound recording click here

These performance was made possible through the use of Desencanto, a process that leads us see the object for its materiality rather than what it was before, breaking the chains and marks of time. My proposal for No Lugar is titled "Tuneado" (Tuned), which disrupts the historical stability of the objects, transforming them into something else. Desencanto helps us see beyond knowledge, allowing us to turn things around until waste reaches a new utility. Through Desencanto, design procedures continue. This concept is essential for creating deeper objects that treat everyday ingenuity as an autonomous tool, breaking with the permanence of the present. Examples include using a fruit box as a pedestal for displaying goods or simply using the box as a seat, without worrying about what it was before.

Using the process of Desencanto to "tune" the material, I took granadillas as a base to create new memories from this form. Through various transformative processes, the granadilla took on different formats, starting with the input of 10 individuals (children, street vendors, and shop owners) who ate the granadilla. Each step is vital in expanding the functions of this object. Each change serves a specific purpose. The seeds were used to create rattles, which now carry with them the individuals who consumed the granadilla. The fruit’s shells were used as sound amplifiers. By utilizing every part of the fruit, the object is "tuned" to produce multiple functions.

The collaboration with Taller La Bola allows for the creation of a space that merges traditional forms and processes with new ones. It is important to think of production methods not as spaces of difference, but as spaces of collaboration and learning. During the activation of the objects, new sounds emerged and conversations were stablished. These devices, formed during the activation with Taller La Bola, will generate new sound units, showing how something as simple as a granadilla can be transformed into new possibilities.

Time takes hold of the signs we construct, returning the material to its original state.

Zero°

01.22 — 03.04.23

Devening Projects invites you to the opening of Zero°, Chicago artist Frank Vega’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show opens Sunday, January 22, from 3 – 5pm and continues until March 4, 2023.

For Vega, a feather is a symbol of a liberated and uninhibited spirit. Full of wonder and allusion, and rich in historical and cultural references, feathers are both the evidence of a winged being and the potential for our own metaphysical buoyancy. Feathers are one of nature’s most beautiful artifacts. As a species, we’ve spent eons reflecting on the color, patterns, elegance and fragility of these evocative traces of flighted beings.

The goose feathers Vega collects and incorporates in his most recent paintings are often arranged as mandalas; radiating from the center, they open the picture plane and draw us nearer. In the same way a portal functions as a threshold between inside and outside, the interiority of the paintings frames a zone both mysterious and hypnotic. This invitation to engage with the physicality of the work begins a deeper enquiry into the intent.

We are compelled by the elegant vestigial feathers and the viscous surfaces swirled into and onto the canvases. It is through the enamel paint that things begin to shift from a light gracefulness toward visceral restraint and stillness. The paint-heavy surfaces lock the feathers in place, keeping them from flight while changing their character and potential. The paint feels industrial; it’s a manufactured material clearly hostile to the feather’s delicacy. But that foreignness has its own quality of subtle allusion. Much like the way tree resin can solidify over time to produce amber, the enamel—formerly liquid—has hardened to forever encase the feathers. The permanence of the embedded feathers stops that moment of flight forever in place. It’s a protective coating, in a sense armor, from an environment less gentle than its own.

“Armoring” in Vega’s work is also seen in Unit-Medusa, his standing sculpture covered with a single endless zipper. The suggestion here is that access to the interior is possible, but likely too complicated and arduous to pursue. What’s inside is fully protected and safe from harm. We’re content to marvel at the complexity of the skin and celebrate the beauty of the hidden and protected entity within.

Frank Vega offers a nightscape. Collaging industrial materials, sound instruments, organic matter, and coated canvas, into what Vega calls Units, Vega stages a moment of characters, satellites, and streams in constant shift, flux and contact

Figuring bodies, structures, and garments through dynamic placements and dark hues, Vega works to mimic sensations of ritual, construction, and transformation that overtly and obscurely point to spirits, energies, and powers.

Curated by John H. Guevara.

https://chuquimarca.com/2022/09/03/mdw-fair-frank-vega/

Ambiente Humano, Koik Contemporary, Review by Anna Garner

The fixed perspective that turns the land into a landscape consciously and unconsciously shapes the relationship between human beings and the environment. Through views based on vision as a property system, the historical tropes used to represent land have shaped the natural as a sublime or sublime backdrop that serves to reinforce socially constructed hierarchies. Within every brilliant or romantic vista, every depiction of man standing on a divine or dangerous precipice, nature is simultaneously a form of conquest, adventurous imperialism, and a resource of capital. In Human Environment, artists explore complicated histories of place to deconstruct the supposed neutrality of nature and highlight the man-made forces that mediate and alter it.

Through video, sculpture, installation and mosaic, the selected pieces point out the socio-political dynamics of resource extraction, while criticizing the connections that man from an anthropocentric perspective has created in relation to the land, through through histories of colonialism and capitalist production. Some pieces wonder about the landscape as a framing device. This curatorship advocates a broad vision of nature, one that does not allow the viewer to avoid environmental destruction through the picturesque, but rather engages the interconnected positions between nature and humanity, and between the collapse of the anthropocentric and its renewal. .