October 15 - December 30, 2022
From Liliana Bloch Gallery:
“Liliana Bloch Gallery is pleased to present its last exhibition of 2022 featuring the work of Salvadorian artist Simón Vega in his second solo exhibition in Texas.
The arrival of the strange, technologically superior white man on the paradise island of the primitive and monstrous brown native is the departing point for the artist’s recent work which comprises ephemeral sculpture, painting, animation, and objects.
Drawing inspiration from the conquest and colonization of Central America, William Shakespeare’s theatrical play “The Tempest”, today’s touristic colonization, and the imposition of Bitcoin as the national currency in El Salvador, as well as Postcolonial and Decolonization theories, the artist develops a non-linear timeless narrative in which past and future collide in today’s cultural, political and economical crisis that is happening in his native country of El Salvador, where unsustainable tourist colonialism, digital currencies, and a new dictator are deeply threatening the ecosystem, local communities, national identity, and citizen’s rights along the beautiful coastal area of La Libertad and beyond.
The narrative frames today’s paradigm of the encounter with the other (or as some would put it their ‘discovery’): the technologically superior visitor meets the primitive native, rationalism meets spiritualism, vacationing meets forced working, and chemical science rejects local shamanism.
The theme of the castaway and its underlying colonialist discourse, so prevalent in 18th-century English and Eurocentric class literature and film, is put into play by William Shakespeare’s main characters: Prospero and Caliban, which inform and inspire the show’s primitive sculptures and paintings. Combining elements from African tribes and Mesoamerican civilizations, the artist re-imagines these two characters as mythical stelae and as primitive raw sculpture fetishes. Their initial encounter and the power play that ensues mirrors today’s rapid and forced colonization of the once beautiful and pristine beaches of EL Salvador. What has been known for centuries as La Libertad has been forcefully changed to “ Surf City”; Playa El Zonte is now called “Bitcoin Beach” and Playa El Majahual (a Native Nahuatl name) is in the process of changing its name officially to “Ma’Hawaii”. These are only a few examples of today’s “Tourists Tempest” a forced, anti-cultural, neo-liberal strategy, designed to steal the local’s land and rights in order for “progress” (and Prosperos) to “develop”.
Simón Vega creates drawings, objects, sculptural installations, and happenings inspired by local markets, self-made architecture, and vendor carts found on the streets and beaches of Central America. His sculptures are Third World replicas of the sophisticated capsules and satellites developed by NASA and the Soviet Space Program during the Space Race, however, they are assembled with found materials that include transmutable elements, colored lights, and live plants. This series, titled Tropical Space Proyectos comments on the effects of the Cold War in contemporary El Salvador and Central America. In other works the artist parodies Mayan pyramids, Modernism’s iconic buildings, and contemporary surveillance systems, creating an ironic and humorous fusion between the first and third worlds.
Born in El Salvador in 1972, Simón Vega graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Veracruz in Mexico in 2000 and received a Master’s degree in Contemporary Arts from the Complutense University in Madrid in 2006.
He has exhibited his work extensively in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, including the 55th Venice Biennial in Italy (2013), the IX Havana Biennial, in Cuba (2006), at the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California (2018), at the Bronx Museum in New York (2019) and most recently at the Centre Pompidou, Paris for the exhibition Cosmópolis #2. His solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Costa Rica, Locust Projects, in Miami, and the Hilger Next Gallery in Vienna amongst others.
Vega’s work is included in important public and private collections such as the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, Museo de la Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo de Costa Rica, the Sanziany Collection at Rasumofsky Palace in Vienna and El Museo del Barrio in New York.
Simón Vega lives and works in La Libertad, El Salvador”
Reception: October 15, 2022 | 5–7 pm
Liliana Bloch (Memphis Street)
4741 Memphis Street
Dallas, 75207 Texas
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