Sergio
Vega
School of Art + Art History
Associate Professor
Specialization: Photography & Sculpture
T: (352)
273-3035
F: (352)
392-8453
E:
veryvega@ufl.edu
Address:
P.O. Box 115801
Gainesville, Fl 32611-5801
Sergio Vega attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study program in 1991-92 and received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1996. He has a been full time faculty at the University of Florida since 1999 and currently teaches in the photography and sculpture departments. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions including The 51st Biennale di Venezia, Italy, The 5th Biennal de Lyon, France, Soonsbeek 9, Arnhem, The Netherlands, The 5th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea, The 1st Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan, and The second Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa. In june of 2006 he presented “Crocodilian Fantasies” at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, his first solo exhibit at a european museum and will be presenting in november of this year “Tropicalounge” a solo show as part of the “Momentum” series at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Freeze, Artnexus, Atlantica, Bomb Magazine, Camera Austria, Flash Art, Bijutsi Techo, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, Il Manifesto, Il sole, Le Monde, and Time Magazine.
For the past ten years Sergio Vega has developed a project titled “El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo” based on the homonymous book by Antonio de Leon Pinelo written in 1650. Fascinated by Pinelo’s theory locating the Garden of Eden in South America, Vega took the task of contesting the presumed location of Paradise through a new interpretation of Pinelo’s text. His research led him to a specific location in Mato Grosso, Brazil.
Vega’s artistic project involves a range of media, including text, photographs, videos, sculpture-objects, dioramas, scale models and installations. His complex approach examines historical and contemporary systems of representation in order to to highlight the modus operandi of colonialist ideologies in the formation of culture and the creation of social conditions. Vega mischievously blends theory, empirical experiences, and an incisive critique of power and society in order to endlessly reconsider and explore a paradise in the field of art in which sensory stimulation and critical discourse are brought together.