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Regina Silveira: Limits

October 06, 2011 – December 10, 2011
Rubin & L Galleries
Curated by Kate Bonansinga

For the first time in the history of the Rubin Center, the work of a single artist, Regina Silveira, occupied both the Rubin Gallery (where the cut-vinyl Gone Wild Reversed was exhibited) and the L Gallery (where two-screen video projection Lunar was exhibited). This is testament to the importance of this artist: she is one of the first Latin American women to earn and sustain international attention in the postmodern era. Gone Wild Reversed referenced both encroachment of human-instigated construction on desert life and the fear of being invaded by the “other.” The artist created it especially for this exhibition, but it was based on Gone Wild created and exhibited for the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Silveira states “by using the tracks of absent animals, the reaction I want to provoke is the degree of amazement of the unexpected, which can take you to an imaginary realm.” Critic Edward M. Epstein states, “For the artist, creeping infestation is a metaphor for political corruption of the kind that sometimes turned her home country, Brazil, into a festering mess.” (Artpapers, June 2010, p. 42) Lunar portrayed natural cycles and ongoing processes. These two works synopsized Silveira’s artistic trajectory because her two foci have been and the political (Gone Wild Reversed) and the poetic (Lunar), and her two primary media are vinyl and video. Regina Silveira: Limits was supported in part by the College of Liberal Arts Alliance for Excellence.

About the artist:

Regina Silveira (b. Porto Alegre, 1939; resides Sao Paulo, Brazil) is one of the most prominent Brazilian artists working today. Her installations, sculptures, prints and photography have intrigued the international art community since the 1970s. Renowned for her parodic explorations of space through geometric constructs, Silveiraʼs work is celebrated for both its conceptual rigor and formal impact. Utilizing technology and graphic manipulation, her art examines the ephemeral nature of the sculptural object, dissolving space and time. She was recently the subject of a retrospective exhibition that occupied the entire museum of Fundacao Ibere Camargo.