Margaret Vega

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I am inspired by the interstices that exist between thoughts, between time periods in our life that feel like emptiness, between the small unnoticed sliver of light and the pauses between questions as we search for answers, between awareness and knowledge. Without these cracks and crevices in life, movement could not exist. We would be stagnant.                           

As a multidisciplinary artist rotating between bodies of work, I am interested in both the found and created artifacts that tell our story. The placed artifacts in my most recent work are designed with a scale that reflects our human need to collect; to reorganize the rhythm of nature and give meaning to the symbolic, hierarchal cataloging of object; to consider or reconsider persistent questions.                        

My work is an ongoing conversation about query: validity and hierarchy in recording the human story, my story. As an observer/maker, I am interested in the history of the crayon I used as a child labeled “Flesh,” as icon and object, to document and categorize. Using symbolism as a layer between what is and what could be, the Color Me Flesh series combines my experience as a painter with sculpture and mixed media. The viewer serves as a comparative element, the medium that questions the boundaries invented to divide us into “otherness”; responsible for the decision: “Can we ever be flesh neutral? Are we still counting?” I am inspired by the pre-colonial Inka language of Khipus and historical documentation with a fixed lens based on skin color resulting in Damnatio Memoriae. These vignettes of query follow two previous bodies of work, Stone Angels: Perpetual Order and Icarus, Dreams Deferred.                     

Simultaneously, the representational landscape is employed to reconnect with the cadence and order of nature while considering its overlapping relationship with myth, dreaming time, or storytelling—all comparative elements marking our fleeting impermanence. Borrowing from different global locations: a cloud, light, a shape, a stone; my focus is on prolonging the fluidity and interrelationships of nature—always momentary, not unlike our human existence.