Statement
Vergara's work explores archives, systems of knowledge, and representations of nature.
In the works here, from the Glass-scapes series, Vergara employs a complex process to photograph museum diorama, which she then digitally manipulates. Vergara explores artificiality: nature transformed into diorama and offered, behind glass, for intellectual delectation. She also plays on the ide of photography as a tool of manifest destiny, ideologically implicated in domination and control of nature.
In Shards she creates impossible scenarios using source material mostly dating back to the early 20th century. Also moving between the archive and fiction, she confronts parallel realities while disrupting certainties related to mass circulation of images and learned imagery epistemologies. Represas explores the historical constructs of the “logical” and geometrical gardens of Italy—an aesthetic manifestation of the idea of disembodied reason—with the “sublime” nature in Chilean landscapes. These works are constructed with images from books from the artist family archive, her mother being Italian and father, Chilean.
The works take the viewer and immerses them into invented scenarios or impossible panoramas, that encourages the viewer to investigate and remap their own coordinates.