Regina Silveira presents “The dream of Mirra and other constellations” at Museo Amparo, Puebla, México

Using animal designs taken from popular imagery of Puebla and working on a grand scale on adhesive vinyl enlarged to the point of almost reaching abstraction, the artist recreates a monumental embroidery on cross-stitch integrated into the walls of the Museum. Added to this giant embroidery are needles and threads meant to reflect a work in progress.

The intervention is titled El sueño de Mirra y otras constelaciones (The dream of Mirra and other constellations), alluding to the China Poblana, a princess named Mirra brought from Asia to Puebla and to whom through the ages this type of embroidery has been associated. The cross-stitch pattern on which Regina chose to present the design of the embroidery reveals designs from the region, imaginarily seeking to remake and use its glass walls as a giant textile, thus reaffirming Poblano identity.

Regina Silveira also presents in three galleries of the Museum a constellation of 12 scale models and six videos of her projects in various parts of the world. The scale models function as strategies of permanence in her interventions, always temporary. Motifs of shadows and footprints are common among the images inscribed on buildings, confronting the arrogant grandeur and permanence of ambitious constructions with the fleeting inconsequence of the temporary: footprints, tire paths, a bright reflection, a shadow, pawprints, and clouds.

Complementing the scale models, the work Mundus Admirabilis—shown for the first time in the exhibition Jardines de Poder in Brasilia—is also presented. This work, using poisonous insects taken from treatises on natural history isolated in a great cage, is a metaphor referring to political life in Brasilia and specifically to the fight for power and to corruption. In various formats from 2007 to the present, the work has been shown at the Museu da Pampulha (Belo Horizonte), at the show Philagrafika (Philadelphia), at the Bienal de Poznan (Poland), at Fundación Iberê Camargo (Porto Alegre) and the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo.