"TU CASTIGO ES VERME"

(above) "In God We Trust" wall installation at Centro Cultural de España (CCE, Spanish Cultural Center) 2006.

"Esquina de Poder", wall vinyl installation. 2007

Tranurbana wall installation at CCE, San Salvador, 2007.

"Decorativo(a)", women's WC intervention at CCE, 2006.

"Decorativa(o) details. CCE 2006.

Calvin at girls' toilette in "Decorativa(o), CCE, 2006.

Shopping window wall intervention, San Salvador, 2006.

Wall interventions with vinyl stickers at Tribeca Gallery, San Salvador.

"Sillón del Águila" original bus seat installation. Embroidered recycled bus seat, neon light, fur, mirror. 2004

"Calle pero Elegante, Sala de Estar". Recovered bus seats, embroidered, neon lights, fur, sticker paintings. 2005

Installation at CCE, 2007.

"Pilder Zeat" bus driver's pimped seat, after Mazinger Z's, 2005

"Guarde su Distancia" neon light sign (Keep your Distance), presented at Central American Biennial in Panamá, 2004.

"Sueño Migrante", Installation at CCE, lightbox, fur, stuffed rabbit, light. 2007.

"Sueño Salvadoreño", C-print, 70 x 100cms. 2004

"Mirror Race" wall intervention with bus mirrors. CCE, 2007.

"Silvestre al acecho" Installation at CCE, 2007.

"Fénix", small installation at CCE, 2007.

"Transurbana" CCE, San Salvador, 2007.

Salvadorean public transportation system is also vessel for cultural identity. They are a spaces for popular art and cultural expression that would not have any other way of manifesting itself.
At the same time that these vehicles perform a practical function, that of transporting citizens from one place to another, they are also a stage for everyday life, a space in which people experience the city while they move in it. They work from the inside out, but also the other way around.
The public buses, particularly the smaller and more profoundly decorated ones (the so called "coasters") also function as living spaces as their drivers and personnel spend most of their day inside them. This motivates them to decorate as if they were in fact their homes while at the same time marking their territory and identity on them.
And so, static concepts such as "domestic" and "territory" acquire a traveling, nomadic meaning.
Some of the most popular and representative dreams and desires are expressed in the buses paraphernalia. Themes like migration and the american dream, religion, power, love, sex, national and sport identities, cultural, comic and cinema heroes populate these buses wether they be in images or in very detailed and highly original typography and calligraphy. Materials include stickers, led and neon lights, felp, resin and more.
The buses have names and the routes they travel are highlited with pride and humor.
The decoration is carried out by males exclusively and therefore transpire a definite macho feel.
These elements are taken and transformed into furniture, paintings, installations, wall drawings and interventions and the artist collaborates with the persons that actually decorate the buses to transform the low culture, kitsh and cheap into snob art objects.
In a country apparently devoid of a conscious cultural identity a very original sense of aesthetics can be found in the most common transportation vehicles.

Since 2005 Simon Vega has been working with local artisians and decorators to create furniture installations such as "Sala de Estar, Calle pero Elegante" (Living Room, Cheap but Elegant) in which he took elements from popular bus decorations and turned them into sticker paintings and had emboided in actual bus's seats that he rescued from garbage and reconstructed, resulting in a black and white installation with purple neon lights that returned the domestic elements that were traveling in the buses back to the house. Even the work's names is taken from the popular "reggaeton" songs that usually blare from the stereos.
In domestica(o) he took the humorous macho-sentimentalist elements and did a sticker intervention on the woman's bathroom of the Spanish Cultural Center in San Salvador. He also removed the big square mirrors and replaced them with a plethora of rearview mirrors in different shapes and sizes and even placed some in the toilets giving them a new, while still functional use. By totally changing the context of this decorations he imbued them with new meaning and a practical use and managed to raise questions on the machismo attitude, which is in fact splattered with a sort of cute romanticism.