سيمون فيغا
סיימון וגה
サイモンベガ

Panopticam Surveillance Hut

source: iamsimonvega

Born In Colombia with an Italian passport and now with a US Green card,
28 years old, Citizen of the world.
We can speak in Spanish, English, Italian or basic Japanese.

Studies:
Industrial Design Graduate from Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
Intelligent Design Diploma from TU/e, Netherlands.
Interactive art director Graduate from Hyper Island, Sweden.
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source: thestudiovisit

Simón is no stranger to the inter­na­tional art scene. He attended grad­u­ate school in Madrid, and has exhib­ited his work in Bal­ti­more, New York, Miami and Mex­ico. This past June, he was in New York cre­at­ing a sculp­ture for the Museo del Barrio’s bien­nial in Socrates Sculp­ture Park. His friend­ship with Peru­vian Amer­i­can and D.C. artist Jose Ruiz led him to the AAC residency.

Simón grew up in El Sal­vador in the late 70’s and early 80’s when the cold war was well under way when both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were vying for influ­ence in Cen­tral Amer­ica. As a young boy, Simón’s under­stand­ing of global pol­i­tics was con­nected with pop­u­lar cul­ture, Hol­ly­wood movies and video games such as the iconic Rocky Bal­boa, the free spir­ited yet deter­mined Amer­i­can boxer in the Rocky movie series, and Ivan Drago the model stoic Russ­ian who appeared in Rocky IV as Rocky’s rival.

When he found out he would be com­ing to the Wash­ing­ton, D.C. area for the res­i­dency, Simón began con­duct­ing research on the rea­sons behind the large pop­u­la­tion of Sal­vado­rans that immi­grated to the United States and specif­i­cally within the DC area in the 1980’s. What he found was dur­ing the late 1980’s, at the height of the Sal­vado­ran Civil War, the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion was inject­ing large sums of money into the cof­fers of the right wing mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment, and per­mit­ting entrance to thou­sands of Sal­vado­rans who fled their home­land that was erupt­ing with violence.

He came to real­ize the civil war that took place in El Sal­vador in the late 80’s was a bi-​​product of the cold war. “El Sal­vador and Nicaragua, other coun­tries in the world, were just play spaces for these two big pow­ers.” Play­ing off of this idea, and his love of 80’s pop cul­ture and iconog­ra­phy, Simón had ini­tially intended to cre­ate a series of arcade pieces, yet when he saw the immense space that was to be his stu­dio in AAC, he decided to cre­ate some­thing more grand. Mon­u­men­tal even. Yet still in dia­logue with the effects of the Cold War on ‘our’ trop­i­cal countries.

At this point in his career, Simón’s work is tem­po­rary sculp­tural instal­la­tion. Although heav­ily influ­enced by the infor­mal archi­tec­ture and col­ors of the mar­gin­al­ized neigh­bor­hoods near his home in San Sal­vador, Simón gath­ers mate­r­ial spe­cific to his cur­rent place of work — in this case Wash­ing­ton D.C. and Arling­ton VA. He told me that he had been impressed with the clean­li­ness and order he encoun­tered in D.C. The scarcity of weath­ered mate­ri­als he col­lected influ­enced the look of the work he made here. The dis­carded mate­ri­als he found were mainly con­struc­tion mate­ri­als, new pieces of lum­ber and tools; ele­ments that reflected the chang­ing nature of D.C. at the moment.

So with this found mate­r­ial and a head full of exten­sive research con­ducted on the pol­i­tics and cir­cum­stances of the Cold War, he erected “The Anti-​​Monument to the Third World Cold War”. This piece is a tow­er­ing struc­ture that stood in the cen­ter of his stu­dio. Anti-​​monumental being that it is tem­po­rary rather than endur­ing or per­ma­nent. The con­struc­tion reliant on the ten­sion between the mate­ri­als rather than on an inher­ent sta­bil­ity — a clear ref­er­ence to Tatlin’s Tower which was designed but never con­structed and was to be a utopian mon­u­ment to the work­ers’ rev­o­lu­tion in Russia.

Else­where in the stu­dio were sev­eral other mid-​​scale wall mounted pieces and set up indi­vid­ual pieces meant to exist in dia­logue with each other. My two favorites were both built around a cen­tral lin­ear hori­zon; a pro­gres­sion of events over time. Appro­pri­ately titled, “Time­line”, made up of dis­carded strips of wood, cut paper, tape, plas­tic tub­ing and curly phone cords, marked a pro­gres­sion of impor­tant his­tor­i­cal events both per­sonal and polit­i­cal. Specif­i­cally events such as World War I & II, Death Squadrons in Cen­tral Amer­ica, rock band KISS’s Hot­ter Than Hell, his parent’s divorce and the release of The Smurfs (2D). “Time­line” speaks to those events that shape a cul­ture as well as an artist. For the piece titled “Uzis and The Nuclear Threat”, he turned plas­tic cylin­ders and nylon rope into a rocket launch, and curved lengths of lam­i­nate into a tra­jec­tory. Through his child­like abil­ity to imbue refuse with mean­ing­ful iden­tity com­bined with his deep under­stand­ing of socio-​​political events, Simón cre­ates work that is both didac­tic and whim­si­cal that exists in a state of delight­ful irony where the high and low brow comingle.

By now Simón is back in El Sal­vador and the work returned to the dump­ster from whence it came. He told me that he has plans to build a card­board space cap­sule pro­to­type next, and per­haps explore some means of com­mer­cially viable pro­duc­tion. Although I don’t doubt that any prod­uct Simón would sell would come with a grain of salt as well.
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source: legalartmiamiorg

Simón Vega creates drawings, ephemeral sculptures and installations inspired in the informal, self made architecture found in marginal zones and shantytowns, and more recently also with the nomad, informal carts of the street vendors. These works, elaborated with wood, cardboard, plastic and found materials often parody famous modern and mythological buildings and cities and high-tech robotics developed by NASA.

Born in San Salvador, El Salvador in 1972, Simon Vega graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Veracruz in Mexico in 1994 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 2006 Havana Biennial, in Cuba, Zona MACO in Mexico City in 2007, at the Bronx River Art Center in New York on 2009 and at Hilger BROT Kunsthalle in Veinna, Austria. He currently lives in El Salvador, where he also teaches at several local universities and art institutions.