Final Year Show 2020
I was born and grew up in Lima, Peru. My grandfather has a hotel on the north coast of Peru, Cabo Blanco Fishing Club, where famous artists like Sinatra and Hemingway together with other famous people from around the world went to fish the Blue Merlin, making this place magic and like a jewel in a surreal desert.
A place I used to visit regularly as a child and where, as an adult, coincidentally finished living there. The bus or car journey to get there was over 1000 Km and maybe this, together with our daily surfing trips in adulthood looking for waves along the desert is why the idea of the road trip has become such an important part of my work.
Of course, as a child, along with these trips, all the other things of childhood were important. I loved the cartoons of the time like The Road Runner and Wili E Coyote, somehow these, plus the realities of the places we passed through on these journeys, like The Moche - Chimu (Pre Inca civilisations) archaeological sites, have become part of one long road trip for me in my work.
Our family car, and the motorway, was not only the vehicle by which we journeyed to my grandfather but has become the vehicle and medium through which I create my work. I want you to experience this road trip with me.
During this trip, I take you through a stream of consciousness like, the moving hills that changes all the time when it rains heavily (that’s why people call them “moving hills”), the San Pedro cactus and its hallucinogen characteristics, used by ancestors to communicate with Gods, a guardian and protector (is said that whistles at night), which I use to have by my door entrance and locals don’t want to mess with it, the desert, the thousands of sunsets, my ancestors iconography and art representing the end of their world and social conflicts, the Wili E Coyote who is a great painter of fake tunnels together with environmental symbols that express my awareness and concern about climate change that brings natural disasters also due to human intervention and have been the reason I started using recycled cardboard boxes together with other recycled materials. All painted based on memories and pictures that I have taken myself.
As an artist, I have the urge to tell a story and it feels like an obligation; we are the reflection of society, through us people will know what we go through and see our reality in the future or in other parts of the world. —Ursula Vargas
As James Baldwin said: “All Art is a kind of confession more less oblique. All artists if they survive, are forced at least, to tell the whole story”.
