Regina Silveira: Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas
Galeria Brito Cimino is staging Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas showing works by artist Regina Silveira, with three exhibition rooms containing 11 works on different supports using multimedia, objectual and acoustic solutions to pose the theme of historical and mythical pests and plagues.
Regina Silveira's works here deploy visual metaphors - such as images of pests - to foreground aspects of the deterioration and danger involved in the presumed continuity, or re-emergence, of pests or plagues. Present-day versions of mythic pests or plagues become visual fables for contemporary life, and her works show the ability to convey and imbue meanings. Once again Silveira uses art forms to interrogate the real world. In her own words, "working with the contemporary contextualization of pests or plagues may derive from present experience or from looking at threats to the future of the planet."
Mixed images of pests are stuck to the walls and floor of the entrance and main hall of the gallery. Insects also appear on porcelain objects and a cross-stitch embroidered towel. A large black egg emits the combined sound of mosquitoes and helicopters and a porcelain panel alludes to the rain of frogs.
In another setting, a wooden well has a video with dripping blood referring to the plague of water turned into blood. In another area there is a sword sunk into the wall with its paradoxical shadow; projected images of mythical animals, fantastic or fierce, escaping from a black box; a sound cylinder in which the sound of gunshot coordinated with flashing lights is a current urban allusion to the plague of hail and fire.
This exhibition Mundus Admirabilis e Outras Pragas features giant insects occupying the gallery entrance hall integrating a kind of great fable in which a series of works using differing means and strategies compose the narrative. Regina Silveira adds: "The source of poetic invention here is simply creating a constellation of visual metaphors (with acoustic inputs) to transpose, comment on, and update biblical and mythical omens in allusion to plagues of our own time."
Her exercise of reflection was an attempt to understand the originally agrarian meaning of the biblical plagues and transpose them to the high level of global woes that afflict us today. Instead of locusts, hail storms, or pestilence, she suggests notions such as the contamination of our everyday existence, crime and violence, degradation of the environment, corruption, fanaticism and other ills.
The works take on a life of their own; each work is a constellation of wide open meanings reaching out on a sensory level, with no need for captions. Although there is no one particular sequence, entering the exhibition area is in itself a compulsory contextualization - due to the graphic covering of large-format pests on the gallery's floors and walls - the introduction to the exhibition is almost like injecting pests into the veins.
Regina Silveira would like her works to be taken as non-linear metaphors for fowl and furious pestilence and plagues besetting our lives in the social, cultural, and environmental ambits, and endangering the planet’s future viability with each passing day.
The Artist
Regina Silveira comes from Porto Alegre, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and lives and works in Sao Paulo. Her bachelor's degree in Painting was awarded by Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. She holds a scholarship from Instituto de Cultura Hispânica, Madrid, Spain; her master's and PhD were earned at the School of Communications and Arts, Universidade de São Paulo (ECA-USP). Her teaching career includes work at Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul, Universidade de Puerto Rico, FAAP-SP, and ECA-USP. She holds grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation. Silveira received the Sergio Motta Art and Technology Award in 2000 and the Bravo Prime Visual Arts Award in 2007.
Regina Silveira has shown at several biennials and group exhibitions, such as Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing (New York, Austin, Caracas, Monterrey and Miami), Brazil: Body and Soul (New York), We Come in Peace… - Histoires des Amériques (Montreal, Canada), Estratégias Barrocas: Arte Contemporáneo Brasileño (Quito, Ecuador), Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan (Puerto Rico), The Shadow (SorØ, Denmark), Tracing Shadows (Jerusalem, Israel) and Fantasmagoría: Espectros de Ausencia (Bogota, Colombia). Some highlights from her many solo exhibitions held in Brazil and internationally since the 1960s: Projectio, at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, Portugal), Masterpieces: In Absentia, at Ledis Flam Gallery (New York, USA), Graphias, at MASP (São Paulo, SP), A Lição, at Galeria Brito Cimino (São Paulo, Brazil) and Sombra Luminosa at Museo de Arte Banco de la República (Bogota, Colombia).
Interventions in specific architectures: Gone Wild, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla (San Diego, USA), INTRO, group exhibition Corps en Mouvement (La Médiatine, Brussels, Belgium), Derrapada, at Centro Cultural de España (Montevideo, Uruguay), Irruption, in Indelible Images, at Houston Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, USA), Irruption:Saga, at the 6th Taipei Bienal, Fine Arts Musem (Taipei, China) and Mundus Admirabilis, Jardim do Poder exhibition at CCBB (Brasília, Brazil). Highlights among her installations for specific architetonic spaces: Claraluz, at CCBB (São Paulo) Lumen (Palácio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain), Observatório, at Pinacoteca do Estado (São Paulo), and Ficções, at Museu Vale do Rio Doce (Vitória, Brazil).
In November 2008, Regina Silveira will be showing at the Blickmaschinen group exhibition curated by Jose Lebreros and Eva Schmidt, posing dialogues between contemporary art and pre-cinema experiments since the 18th century. The exhibition will be staged in Siegen, Germany, and then at Mücsarnok (Budapest, Hungary) and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville, Spain). In March 2009, she will be showing at the Museum of Sketches in Koege, Denmark, with curatorial design by Christine Buhl Andersen, the institution's director. For this exhibition, she is planning an installation designed especially for the building's interior architecture and will compose a set of around 40 models and sketches of other similar works executed in the course of her long and fruitful career.
