REGINA REX  
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Practices Remain
7/20/2012- 8/26/2012


Opening Reception: Friday, July 20, 7-10pm


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 Remain also includes the following text by René Morales, Miami Art Museum Associate Curator.

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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


Press:

PRACTICES REMAIN
The New Yorker




Gean Moreno, Kerry Phillips, Carlos Rigau, Odalis Valdivieso


Alexandra Hopf, Marcos Valella


Moira Holohan, Jorge Pantoja


Diego Singh, Sinisa Kukec, Christy Gast, Consuelo Castaneda


Moira Holohan
Untitled (sky series)
2012
Monoprint
5 x 9 In



Consuelo Castaneda
Shelf project 05
2011
Mixed media on paper
75 x 30 in (approx.)



Christy Gast
YES
2012
Burlap, cotton
80 x 26 x 3 in



Jorge Pantoja
French sexualité
2012
Acrylic ink on DVD

Teenager curriculum
2012
Acrylic ink on DVD

Nudes
2012
Acrylic ink on DVD



Marcos Valella
Untitled
2012
30 x 40 In
Oil on canvas

Untitled
2012
30 x 40 In
Oil on canvas



Alexandra Hopf
Posters #9-12
2012
Gouache, acrylic on paper
38.5 x 30.3 In



Odalis Valdivieso
Seven
2012
16 x 11 In
C-print



Kerry Phillips
Text Messages (all the texts I've gotten on this phone since I got it in 2008)
2010-present
Series of framed pen & ink drawings

Carlos Rigau
Formal object process
2012
White and Black gaffe tape, black foil, spray paint, paper print, on wood board
Dimensions variable



Gean Moreno
Untiled (Thelema Parametrics)
2012
Color pencils and marker on book cover
8 x 10 In



Diego Singh
Regis de Bray
2012
Ink on PVC canvas
48 x 72 In



Sinisa Kukec
Down to the smallest unit of everything
2012
Felt, epoxy, tempera, mixed media
43 x 20 x 24 In



Sinisa Kukec
Down to the smallest unit of everything
2012
Felt, epoxy, tempera, mixed media
43 x 20 x 24 In



Installation view


Installation view


Installation view


Installation view