Ten years ago Sergio Vega came across the book El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo (Paradise in the New World), which was written by Spanish colonial historian Antonio de León Pinelo in 1656. Pinelo’s text is culled from the theories and travels of several earlier figures and locates the Garden of Eden in South America. Enthralled by this text, Vega took it upon himself to locate the site, and has developed an ongoing project of the same name. Through Pinelo’s description and a map drawn in 1617, Vega was led to Brazil’s region of Mato Grosso, where today slash-and-burn farming is taking a toll on the environment. The area featured in the photographs was once lush Amazonian rainforest and is now an example of extreme desertification. There have been attempts to cultivate the land for organic farming, but, the land now is now highly flammable, with fires occurring almost every two years.

Sergio Vega has exhibited installations derived from El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo in many international venues including solo exhibitions Momentum 6: Tropicalounge at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Crocodilian Fantasies at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; and Utopian Paradises: modernism and the sublime at Umberto di Marino Arte Contemporanea Napoli, Italy. His work has been included in the Sharjah Biennial 8, Still Life, Art, Ecology & the Politics of Change, Sharjah Expo Center, United Arab Emirates; and the 51 Biennale di Venezia with Always a Little Further at the Arsenale, Venice, Italy in 2005. He was awarded The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Ford/Phillip Morris Foundation Fellowship from Yale University, New Haven, CT. Vega is an Associate Professor at the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. He received his MFA in sculpture from Yale University, New Haven, CT, and was an Artist in Residence there in 2006-2007. For more information visit www.sergiovega-art.net.