I work across sculpture, installation and painting, paths that meet and diverge constantly. My interest in sculpture came after a sustained painting practice, when I felt the need to connect more with touch. After I moved to the US, I felt a misalignment with my body. Signs, protocols, social cues, and even language were all foreign to me and many times I felt out of place. That estrangement sharpened my attention to the instances where categories, prejudices, wordplays — even the act of naming someone (or something) — stumble, and language reveals itself as an open and unfinished construction, deeply tied to an embodied experience. 

    Animals and people are constantly present in my work, afflicted and affected by language, their surroundings, conditions and systems of belief. Moving between representation and abstraction, I use materials that allow me to play with the legibility and illegibility of text, diagrams and images, frustrating any direct transmission of meaning. By embossing, engraving, covering and melting, making the language barely perceptible, I attempt to undermine the viewers' expectation that reading will explain what looking cannot. Beeswax, sugar, wood and steel allow me to replicate, extract, erase and erode each piece so I can reveal something in their surface. Whether it is through time as they react to the environment, or through my own repetitive set of actions, as it happens in the sedimentation of layers in a painting, I invite the viewers to slow down and to tune in to a more sustained way of watching.

Juana Vargas Moreno (b. 1998) lives and works in Brooklyn. Through sculpture, painting and installation, her work deals with language, both written and language, an particularly the moments when it fails. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 2020 from the Universidad de los Andes and an MFA in Fine Arts in 2026 from The New School’s Parsons School of Design. Her work has been exhibited in numerous collective exhibitions in self-funded initiatives, galleries and institutions, including “Una moneda al aire” curated by Ximena Gama in 'Arte Cámara' in ARTBO (Bogota International Art Fair).
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Nacida en Bogotá en 1998 , actualmente vive y trabaja en Brooklyn, NY. En 2020 recibió el título de Maestra en Arte de la Universidad de los Andes con énfasis en Artes Plásticas y en Pintura. Cuenta con dos opciones de la misma universidad, una Opción en ‘Historia del Arte’ y otra en ‘Cine, Video y Animación’. Hizo parte del porgrama Artbo Tutor en el año 2022, organizado por la Cámara de Comercio de Bogotá.  En 2026, Vargas Moreno terminó su MFA en Fine Arts de Parsons School of Design. Su trabajo ha sido expuesto en diversas convocatorias, iniciativas independientes, galerías e instituciones incluyendo la sección Arte Cámara de  ARTBO (Feria de Arte Internacional de Bogotá) bajo la curadoría de  Ximena Gama para la exposición ‘Una moneda al aire.’ 

CV