MULTITUDES is a celebration of Bart Vargas’ use of materials, form, pattern, and color through sculpture and painting. This twenty-year retrospective of Vargas’ work consists of objects and images built from salvaged materials. Many of these award-winning works have been exhibited across the nation and world, graced book covers and publications, but have not previously been exhibited in North Carolina.
Bart Vargas; Keyboard Eggs
Bart Vargas; Water Bottleball
Bart Vargas; Mandella
Bart Vargas; Keyboard Globe
Bart Vargas; There are Places on the Map that Don’t Exist
Bart Vargas; Bitter Pill
Artist statement
Aspects of salvage, appropriation and repetition run through all my works. I recover local materials deemed unwanted or useless, including trash, recyclables, and surplus items and then transform them into playful, approachable and thought-provoking objects. This practice is most obvious in my sculptures, in which I use readily identified objects such as plastic bottles, cardboard, keyboard keys and empty paint containers. I play with the familiarity of these materials by blurring their identities into universal forms like spheres, globes, maps, pyramids, pills and skulls. These works address such diverse topics as contextual regional geography, the damaging effects of plastic on our bodies and global environment and the multitudes of waste created by technological advancement. My sculptures evoke the taken for granted nature of everyday materials in society.
I want my creations to act as artifacts and evidence at the dawn of the Anthropocene and of the early 21st century, an era of limited resources and extraordinary consumption and waste.
–Bart Vargas
About the artist
Bart Vargas is a visual artist, educator and advocate from Bellevue, Nebraska. He received his BFA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and his MFA at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, and his work can be found in many collections throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. His works have also been featured in many publications, including Sculpture Magazine, New American Paintings and HGTV Magazine. Vargas lives with his wife Bekah Jerde, and their 90+ plants in Omaha, Nebraska where they own and operate an international studio. Vargas is also an Instructor of Visual Arts at Iowa Western Community College in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Additional resources
- Flickr – Installation Images
- Summer Exhibition Celebration
- Bart Vargas – Official website