Cosmologies

Regina Vater

Exhibition: Jun 10 – Jul 18, 1999


An idiosyncratic pantheism, a multiplicity of gods as well as styles, directs the production of Regina Vater’s art. The shamanistic hand that guides her practice has a long arm that reaches across nationalities and centuries, languages and artistic strategies – with a special emphasis on her native Brazil. With a kind of baroque spiritualism anointed to bless and unify otherwise diverse cultural entities, her work synthesizes goddesses from Egypt with those of Greece, Malevich with the Madonna and Concrete Poetry with Roman Catholicism. Similarly, she is as comfortable working with the electronic powers of neon and video as she is with the natural forces of found rocks, seashells, honey, popcorn and other artifacts from nature.

Her pluralistic approach, which seeks to synthesize otherwise diverse materials and ideas, is structured according to poetic intuition. Indeed, literature and poetry play an important role in Vater’s artistic process. Cosmologies, her exhibition of new work at ArtPace, opens with a prayer-like quote from the poet Cecilia Meireles that expresses Vater’s aesthetic aim toward unification with divine nature:

One speaks with men, with saints,

with oneself, with God…And no one

understands what is being told

and to whom.

But the earth and sun, moons and stars

revolve in such a way, so well

that one discourages of complaints.

Amen.

Primarily sculptural and inspired by diverse sources taken from world literature, Vater’s Cosmologies installation is unified by a hopeful appeal to the mysteries of the universe, especially as personified in the lives and mythologies of goddesses. Although highly influenced by the secular aesthetics of Modernism, the works are nonetheless imbued with a spiritualism that coaxes the materiality of their forms into a place of contemplative ritual, even prayer.

Amon/Amén or Oxalá Que Dê Bom Tempo #3 is a delicate, circular cascade of popcorn suspended from and around a window in the ceiling that faces the heavens, the individual kernels strung on fishing wire like beads on a necklace (and anchored, like a casting line, with small weights). The hanging corn, one of the major food crops indigenous to the Americas, is like a shower of manna. “Amén,” the Judeo-Christian rejoiner for agreement and truth, has its etymological origins in the name of a god from the Egyptian pantheon, while the Portugese part of the work’s title, Oxalá Que Dê Bom Tempo (I wish for good times or good weather), situates the sculpture as a plea for plenty as well as an expression of gratitude.

In the central gallery, on the floor just in front of Amon/Amén, the artist placed a small vessel of rice punctuated by burning sticks of incense (later removed from the installation after the opening). Perhaps the most explicitly religious gesture in the Cosmologies installation, this ‘food for the gods’ provides the central signifying code for interpreting the other larger works in the exhibition.

Inscrutable is a homage to the goddess Oshum, who governs waters, brings wealth and compassion and at night takes a sword after unethical people. A gold net rug is situated on the floor like a prayer rug; atop it the artist has place a mirrored stand which holds a vessel full of honey stabbed with a long machete. The sea goddess Janaína is honored in Vater’s work of the same name, where a rock placed in the center of a small tabletop acts as pedestal to a large conch shell adorned with smaller sea shells, dried starfish, and clear glass pebbles. The tableau is framed with a biomorphic neon light that looks like a halo. The use of neon as a symbolic aura also appears in Oxumaré or The Lady of Hope, a tower of assembled found objects, whose chest of drawers base contains letters from the artist’s intellectual and spiritual compatriots in Brazil, a reification of the artist’s personal and artistic foundation in her native culture. A column that extends upward from the wooden chest holds two rocks (found by the artist in Austin), which shelter and protect a small statue of the Black Madonna that faces the wall, hiding The Lady from immediate view. In Sophia, the artist also constructs a tower to heaven, this one of Plexiglas full of human hair and topped with a mound of turquoise. For Vater, all natural and cultural materials are imbued with symbolic as well as material aspects.

In the most ambitious piece presented in Cosmologies, the artist offers viewers the reflection of the moon. Titled as a wordplay as well as a reference to the goddess Artemis, El Teatro De la Luna or ARTéMIS a No uS combines the cultural tradition of theater with the suggestion that nature, likewise, is composed of organized scenes, stagings and acts. The black curtains that line the three walls of this ‘set’ enclose a large boulder seated on a floor of dark cobalt blue mulch, simulating a nature-like setting. The work’s centerpiece—the boulder—acts as both an alter of sacrifice and table of nourishment. A small pool of water rests in the center of a wide crevice on the rock’s surface, in which the viewer is invited to catch the reflection of the moon (whose image the artist has captured on a video monitor in the ceiling.)

For Vater, nature and culture reinforce each other in an ongoing dialogue of serendipitous play between divine intervention and cultural manifestation. She is like a traveler on a world journey, mapping the cosmic moments—whether they be delivered from ancient gods, taking the form of divine inspiration, or constructed by human hands in the name of poetry, life and art.

-Laura Cottingham

Laura Cottingham is an art critic who lives in New York City.

Artist

Regina Vater

Austin, Texas, USA

Regina Vater was born in 1943 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and studied architecture at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Currently, she lives and works in Austin, TX. Since the 1960s, Vater has exhibited her work widely throughout Brazil and the U.S., including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janiero, Brazil; the Museum of Brazilian Art, Sao Paulo; Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paulo, Brazil; the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art (formerly the Huntington Art Gallery) at The University of Texas at Austin; Donnell Library, New York; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL; Mexic-Arte, Austin, TX; and Women and Their Work, Austin, TX. She has participated in a large number of group exhibitions, including shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; San Diego Museum of Art, CA; The Clocktower Gallery/P.S. 1, New York; Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; and the National Royal Museum, Antwerp, Belgium. Her work has been included in international festivals and biennials, notably the 1988 Texas Triennial; the 1981 Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil; the 1976 Venice Biennale, Italy; and the 1967 Paris Biennial, France.
Metaphysics and the cultural traditions of her Brazilian roots have been the primary subjects of Regina Vater’s long career. Since the 1970s, Vater has produced a wide range of installation art, drawing inspiration from mythological themes related to indigenous and Yoruba Brazil, especially with regard to notions of time. Her explorations of sacred and ritualistic practices merge with her personal and social histories in works that incorporate visual poetry, found objects and media to convey a universal sense of healing. Vater’s contributions to and investigations of Brazilian culture have been significant and widely recognized.

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Curators

Amada Cruz

Los Angeles, CA
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Kellie Jones

New York, NY
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Nancy Rubins

Topanga, California, USA

Born in 1952 in Naples, Texas, Californian Nancy Rubins received her MFA from the University of California, Davis. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at Paul Kasmin Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Venice Biennale Aperto. Rubins’ work was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ Helter Skelter exhibit in 1992. Rubins teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Art Department. She has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Annette DiMeo Carlozzi

Austin, TX

Independent curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi has built an expansive practice across the US as a curator of modern and contemporary art, focusing on ideas and experiences, artists and audiences. Raised in Boston and trained at the Walker Art Center, she has served in a variety of foundational roles: as the first curator at Laguna Gloria Art Museum (now The Contemporary Austin); executive director of the Aspen Art Museum and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Visual Arts Producer for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta; and in multiple positions—ranging from founding modern and contemporary curator to Deputy Director for Art and Programs to Curator at Large—at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. Committed to expanding the canon, she has created notable exhibitions (Luis Jiménez, Paul Chan, Michael Smith, Deborah Hay, Negotiating Small TruthsAmerica/AmericasDesire), produced important commissions (Nancy Holt, Siah Armajani, Betye Saar, Vito Acconci, Byron Kim, Teresita Fernández), and acquired major works by a wide range of international artists. Carlozzi has had a long relationship with Artpace, having served as an early advisor, artist interviewer, and program panelist, member of the 1998 artist selection panel and 2001–03 Board of Visitors. In 2015 she curated Immersed from Linda Pace’s art collection, now called Ruby City.

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Dan Cameron

Newport Beach, California

From 2012 to 2015 he was Chief Curator at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California. In 2006, Dan Cameron founded the Biennial Prospect New Orleans, where he worked at until 2011. From 1995 to 2005 he was Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, where he developed numerous group exhibitions, such as East Village USA and Living inside the Grid, and several individual shows dedicated to the artists Martin Wong, William Kentridge, Carolee Schneemann, Carroll Dunham, Doris Salcedo, José Antonio Hernández Diez, among others.
As independent curator he has organized many exhibitions that brought him international attention, such as El arte y su doble (Fundación Caixa, Madrid, 1987); El jardín salvaje (Fundación Caixa, Barcelona, 1991); Cocido y crudo (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1995), among many others. In 2003, he was the Artistic Director of the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and in 2006, Co-curator of the 5th Taipei Biennial.
He has published hundreds of texts in books, catalogues and magazines, and has given numerous talks and conferences at museums and universities around the world, also carrying out an important teaching activity in New York.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist

London, England

Hans Ulrich-Obrist is the Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, positions created for Ulrich-Obrist in April 2006. As a curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France since 2000, among many other exhibitions he organized solo shows with Jonas Mekas (2003), Anri Sala (2004), and Cerith Wyn Evans (2006). Before this position Ulrich-Obrist was an independent curator for a decade, organizing the group show Take Me I’m Yours at the Serpentine (1995) and Retrace Your Steps: Remember at the John Soane Museum (1999), also in London, England. Ulrich-Obrist was a panelist in 1998 for the 1999-2000 year of artists, and was invited to be a speaker at the 2003 symposium, but was unable to come due to illness.
Photo by Dominik Gigler

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