Platform Graduate Award 2020
“Yes! The show must go on after all…“
“In this extraordinarily challenging year when universities and galleries have had to close their doors, support for graduates entering an uncertain landscape is needed more urgently than ever. The Platform Graduate Award 2020 enables us to join our network partners in revealing the high quality and diversity of practice that continues to emerge from the eleven participating art schools.”
I was lucky and very grateful that my application was accepted to be an exhibiting artist at Phoenix Art Space for the Platform Graduate Award led by CVAN South East together with 4 more graduate artists, after going through the big disappointment of not been able to have a Final Year Show due to restrictions and closure of University buildings. This opportunity able me to show the work I prepared and that was going to display, now in this great space in the centre of Brighton and it could be looked from the road or passing by walking.
The exhibition was during the 1st lockdown, and everything was strange and surreal, closed shops and public buildings, empty streets, and roads, but whoever pass the Phoenix Art Space exhibition building was able to see the show and I was happy with that.
The 4 pieces I exhibited was part of the body of work I did on my last year at university. The 3rd piece titled “Self Portrait”, was done after we left the university studios and was done in my garden due to lack of space inside the house, thank God were sunny days and weather allowed me to do it.
—Ursula Vargas
Without proper access, a viewer of the show from the roadside will probably see the works displayed from what is normally the final section of the gallery, as a left to right scan of the front windows initially present my three large paintings.
The above image on the right is the two metres high, ‘Every Man, For Himself’, a floor-based triptych, but on reality was a re used opened cardboard box. —Ursula Vargas
Photo Credit: Bernard G. Mills
The term ‘ACCIÓN POÉTICA’ has been scrawled onto a banner-like flap on the top of the centre panel that lends a contemporary reference to a movement in South America along the Panamericana Highway that runs from Chile to Venezuela along the Pacific coast, that encourages reading, most especially of poetry, short poems about people engage on these trips with their thoughts and feelings who travel via a positive form of tagging.
The primary source of narrative in the paintings is visual of course and the landscape backdrop sets the scene for three foreground characters. The visual references to Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons are revealed by the rocky topography and a Coyote character on the righthand side that leaps across, or into, a chasm whilst holding three balloons to save him from the fall. To the left a figure from pre-Columbian art (a visually rich culture without a writing system) appears be juggling items that look like snakes and rocks, resembling a natural disaster. Between these two, in the centre panel, a scaly bird-like creature stares with one eye at the viewer as if conveying a message of some importance. The long, winding road links foreground to background and disappears into one of the famous Willie E Coyote fake tunnels.
It’s a surreal scene that conjures cultural pasts and presents into personal experiences of the extensive road travel that have undertaken in my partly nomadic life.
Written in collaboration with Geoff Hands.
Photo Credit: Bernard G. Mills - Where the Braves Die
Another work, ‘Where the Braves Die’, also presents three foreground features: cartoon Coyote, representing human intervention on natural resources exploitation, a road sign for an oil extraction pump and a pre-Columbian stone statue next to cracked piece of land created by an earthquake, with his thumb up, giving us a sign of calmness and that “everything will be alright”. Again, the landscape appears to be wrecked by human activity together with earthquakes and the horizontal lines representing geological faults, were the highway to hell takes the viewer’s gaze to a Shell sign as a sunset on the far horizon. The colour palette, essentially yellow, orange and purple it is purposefully crude, referencing street art (aka graffiti) as much as cartoon imagery. Have used as a background scenery, layers of mountains made of re used cardboard boxes behind the sand dunes giving the sensation of a continuous filmic passage.
Written in collaboration with Geoff Hands
The third piece in this space is ‘Self Portrait’, one of the most memorable pieces from the initial selection process. The bold use of colour grabs the attention first and the dripping orange paint that depicts the outline of distant landforms behind which a yellow sun appears to rise, clearly rejects any romantic notions of the beautiful sublimity of nature. In fact, the philosophical notions of the ‘sublime’ (surely an overused term in contemporary discourse) as postulated by Burke and Kant in the 18th century, referencing the potentially delightful and uplifting, but also the overwhelming and horrific physical and emotional affect, of the powers of ‘nature’, are referenced by Vargas’ take on the western landscape tradition. To send an unequivocal message, with the addition of the actual contents of a recycle bin she introduces (now in a global context) the evidence of the environmental fuck-up that prevails. Subtlety and diplomacy in imagery, paint rendering or pleasing ‘aesthetic taste’ is suitably rejected for maximum effect.
Written by Geoff Hands
Photo Credit: Bernard G. Mills
Moving into the larger gallery space Vargas joins her four co-exhibitors with ‘Me Llama La Llama (The Llama Calls Me)’. This is a poignant work that adds a sentiment that rises above the cartoon simplicity of the visual language appropriated for this series of paintings. In anthropomorphic terms the Llama looks a friendly soul and, again, we see the road that will take the traveller away from her homeland and a view of distant snow-topped mountains that are picturesquely framed by a tunnel cut through the rock. That such romantic tropes provide such agency and emotional potency might bring some comfort after all.
Written by Geoff Hands.
