Statement on Shards
Shards_Subductions refers to Vergara’s process of hunting through old art books for photographs of marble and wood sculptures; tearing the photographs into pieces, isolating areas of deeply carved, often tumultuous drapery; assembling these shards into compositions; and reassembling and rephotographing the pieces in endless variations, transforming texture and scale in the process. The term “subduction” is borrowed from geology, referring to the movements of the edge of one tectonic plate under another, the first sinking into the earth’s mantle as the plates converge. Vergara regards the interplay of the shards’ edges and the powerful implied movement in the draperies as analogous to these subterranean mechanics. The result is abstraction, imbued with the artist’s personal meanings deriving from the represented sculptures themselves, the romance of old photographic illustration, and the ever present urge to compose.
The ways that forms variously flow into, support, or abruptly abut within each photograph applies as well to the interaction of multiple photographs within this framework. Complicating and reframing what were once historically familiar artworks, her subversive displacement of abstracted forms liberates the works from their origins and extracts entirely new terrains from sculptural bodies.