Virginia-Inés Vergara - Shard

Virginia-Inés Vergara

Shards began in 2010. In that year I began assembling torn fragments of old illustrations of world art, which I arranged into compositions and photographed. I constantly add to and re-arrange these fragments, which, with their often ragged edges, I think of as shards. Compositions that might at first seem disjointed, are unified by natural light. As the daylight changes with weather conditions, the quality of light and the lengths of the shadows change. My eye remains on photography in relation to perception. For example, we tend to view intact illustrations of, say, paintings, as “paintings” before acknowledging them as photographs. In Shards one means through which I shatter that perception is by drawing attention to the uneven edges of the ripped illustrations. I am emotionally as well as aesthetically drawn to the original works of art. And I feel similarly about the illustrations, with their immediate, tactile accessibility that allows me to make them my own, conceptually and artistically. For example, all the fragments are pictures of stone, and the stone-colored compositions are meant to evoke relationships between artistically wrought human figures from the Greco-Roman and Baroque periods, on the one hand, and rough mineral matter on the other.