Statement

In this work, Virginia Inés Vergara has created an alternate fantasy world. When she was in art school training to be an abstract painter, she was always wary of photography. The subject matter seemed to belong to someone else. Eventually she realized that she could intervene in the technical processes of photography—darkroom manipulation for example—to such an extent that it would be impossible for someone else to reproduce her work. The imagery therefore became her own.


Like a movie set, with the Glass-scapes Vergara draws attention to the artificiality of her photographs in relation to the “original” natural scene. This allows her to delve deeper into the complex duality—Nature vs. Art—that the dioramas embody.  By playing with depth of field and focus, she enhances the flatness of the image in a way that recalls Romantic landscape paintings.


Another example of digital manipulation is the omission all of the animals from the shots of the dioramas. The main shift however has to do with compressing the scene portrayed in the diorama and trying to visually combine the three-dimensional elements (sculpture-diorama-props) with the flat two-dimensional background (scenery painting). In this way, she is melding mediums in her cameras and creating a new way of seeing.

With the Glass-scapes she created images that share the flat look of Modern art. She uses the word ‘image,’ as this work is not strictly a photograph. A close-up view of the pictures reveal paint brush strokes for instance. It would be redundant to take pictures that try to reproduce the look of the three-dimensional world, so instead she made photographs that would be perceived as a flat plane—specifically, a pane of stained glass.