"Practices Remain" Exhibition

Regina Rex

poster for "Practices Remain" Exhibition

This event has ended.

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.

Media

Schedule

from July 20, 2012 to August 25, 2012

Opening Reception on 2012-07-20 from 19:00 to 22:00

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