Argentina in Focus: Cristian Segura / Sergio Vega at the Art Museum of The Americas

Curated by Alma Ruiz of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, this exhibition fuses contemporary trends that took shape geographically apart and that belong to different generations. Vega represents the Argentine Diaspora in the US, while Segura has emerged from a local Argentine setting.

Cristian Segura (b. 1976), who lives in Tandil (a city in the province of Buenos Aires), follows a line of work that comprises a range of strategies to deal with the mechanisms and variability of contemporary art, always with a critical and reflexive eye on the institutional terrain. He took an early interest in art, which led him to become a museum volunteer at fourteen, an exhibitions coordinator at nineteen, and the director of Tandil’s municipal art museum at twenty‐three.

His experiences with navigating issues surrounding museum work motivated him to produce artwork of his own, and these themes remain vital to Segura’s output. He explores the conservation of the artistic histories that are housed in the institution, the dependence on political and public support, as well as the idea of permanence and preservation of the arts when a museum can fall victim to its own poor management and a lack of interest, or even literally be consumed by fire. In Incendio en el museo (Fire in the museum, 2010), a piece created for this exhibition, Segura simulates flames on the exterior of the Art Museum of the Americas, calling attention to the real possibility of objects vanishing from the natural world in a matter of hours or minutes.

In Skateboarding at MACBA, Museu d’ Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Patinar en el MACBA, Museu d’ Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008), Segura addresses museums being used for purposes beyond what they are intended for. His piece includes imagery of skateboarders using the steps outside of the institution for performing tricks, incorporating the hat of a security guard who would be tasked with preventing such use.

Sergio Vega (b.1959) is interested in the concept of Latin America as an exotic place and therefore desirable to outsiders for reasons that only account for a small portion of reality at most. His studies of Argentine‐born Spanish‐colonial historian Antonio de León Pinelo, who believed the Garden of Eden to be located in the center of South America, led Vega to embark on the body of work known as Paradise in the New World, which continues to evolve.

The artist creates exotic worlds of felt tree cut‐outs which light struggles to penetrate, documents the slashing and burning of forests, and confronts viewers with images of slums and extreme poverty. The images are a harsh contrast to the concept of Latin America as a place of quasi‐biblical exoticism and mythology.

In Across the Corpus Callosum (Al otro lado del corpus callosum, 2005), Vega invites a parrot to speak at a museum. The stuffed parrot perches behind a microphone before a color sampler that shows the range of hues found in parrots’ feathers. Vega had noticed that the Bible depicts parrots as the only non‐human animal capable of speech, as well as the only animal that exists in every color gamma. Exhibition curator Alma Ruiz notes that “the parrot’s anthropomorphic qualities and its mimicry skills have been discussed by scientists, philosophers, and writers: this time it is Vega, a visual artist, who invites the parrot to speak in the museum, the very institution that Segura has held under a microscope.”

Art collector Dani Levinas, who brought this project to AMA and co‐organized the show Argentina in Focus: Visualizing the Concept—Cristian Segura/Sergio, was much inspired by conceptual artist and critic Brian O’Dougherty‘s legendary phrase “Space now is not just where things happen; things make space happen”.

Levinas wanted to bring two artists from his native Argentina whose works reflect the diversity of contemporary art in that country: “Sergio Vega brings the world into the museum and Segura takes the museum out into the world."