Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Sound, Drawing
Website: lukavergoz.com
Luka Vergoz (he/they) is an Oakland-based sculptor and installation artist. They grew up across several states, including Indianapolis from age ten through high school, before pursuing undergraduate studies at Vassar College in upstate New York, where they initially explored cognitive science and physics before committing to art. Vergoz completed an MFA in Studio Art from UC Davis in 2023, and upon graduation was awarded the 2023–24 Graduate Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County — a selective year-long residency offering studio space in former army barracks on National Park Service land.
Following the Headlands fellowship, Vergoz settled in Oakland, maintaining ties to the broader Bay Area arts community. Their work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Pelota Gallery on Treasure Island, Root Division, Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland, and the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis. Vergoz has been featured in Comstock’s magazine and selected for multiple competitive group exhibitions, including Root Division’s annual juried Introductions show in 2024.
Vergoz creates sculptures and installations by finding, altering, and arranging discarded material scraps — byproducts of construction and casualties of time — into shifting spatial and visual systems. Working across two-dimensional, bas-relief, and three-dimensional forms alongside sound compositions, the practice is anchored in a philosophy of material transformation: “All making is unmaking.” Drawing on the laws of conservation of mass and energy, Vergoz asks whether all change is ultimately rearrangement, exploring this through mark-making, dying materials, photography, and physical form. Dense thickets of wooden structures with legs of varying lengths support polygonal flat surfaces; colorful blocks cluster beneath wooden fronds — objects caught mid-becoming.
Sound is treated as equally material: Vergoz collects scraps of audio just as they collect physical scraps, assembling sonic compositions from a self-built “scrap library” using synthesizers and handmade instruments. Across media, the work engages with physics, language, scale, and the transsexual experience, seeking specificity within abstraction. The artist describes this as a search for the moment “form” shifts from noun to verb.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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