NinaJohnson

Consuelo Castaneda
Christy Gast
Moira Holohan
Alexandra Hopf
Sinisa Kukec
Gean Moreno
Jorge Pantoja
Kerry Phillips
Carlos Rigau
Diego Singh
Odalis Valdivieso
Marcos Valella

Regina Rex is pleased to present Practices Remain—a roving exhibition initiated earlier this year in Miami by artists Alexandra Hopf, Odalis Valdivieso and Marcos Valella. Sharing an affinity with the collaborative nature of this project, Regina Rex is excited to open its doors to a group of like-minded artists working in another city—highlighting the power of simultaneity and mutuality within artistic practice. This second iteration of Practices Remainalso includes the following text by René Morales, Miami Art Museum Associate Curator.

Practices Remain is an artist-organized exhibition in the truest sense. Steering clear of rigid curatorial premises, it is structured instead around a specific and little understood phase in the artistic process. Each of the works on display inhabits the amorphous zone that artists pass through just before arriving at a final product. They were selected by the organizers – through personal engagement, artist-to-artist – precisely because they each appear “finished” in formal terms while remaining just shy of being able to stand alone. These are not “studies” or “sketches” – terms that shield the objects they describe, apologizing for them – but neither do they aspire to full autonomy. They are chimeras, suspended between categories, abuzz with potential but riddled with doubt and oozing vulnerability.Diego Singh and Marcos Valella take a cold, hard look at the loaded genre of gestural abstraction, testing the liminal territory where old ideals of expressivity give way to the cynical performance of formulas for attaining the look of resolved, modernistic painting. Consuelo Castañeda, Alexandra Hopf, Gean Moreno, and Odalis Valdivieso also take liberties with a modernist painterly tradition – in this case, geometric abstraction – less to abuse it than to bend it to their own ends, from the prototyping of utilitarian furniture (Castañeda) to the merger of parametric architecture with occult semiotics (Moreno). Moira Holohan and Carlos Rigau contribute works that occupy the unlikely spaces between video, sculpture, and two-dimensional composition. Christy Gast, Jorge Pantoja, Kerry Phillips, and Sinisa Kukec each remove an eclectic array of artifacts from the world, divorcing them from their particular histories in order to transform them into new instruments of living memory.

The works in this show reveal the pressures involved in forging objects that can encompass and communicate broader conceptual explorations. As a group, they become uniquely valuable, elucidating an aspect of artistic practice that may be well-known to makers but that remains largely unfamiliar to the rest of us.

René Morales
Associate Curator, Miami Art Museum