What happens when an image fragments and time insists on rearranging it? In Latin American Puzzle, Regina Silveira (b. 1939, Porto Alegre, Brazil) revisits the same question three decades later. Presented at Alexander Gray Associates in New York, the exhibition brings together two puzzles, To be Continued… (1997) and Continued… (2025), which, rather than closing a cycle, expand it.
A pioneer of video and mixed-media art in Brazil, Silveira constructs each work from one hundred pieces that assemble disparate images: social events, iconic figures, and illustrations interwoven with explicit references to Latin American culture.
The thirty-year gap between the two pieces not only introduces formal and emotional contrasts, but also reveals how history, when repeated, mutates. Described by the artist as “an entropic patchwork quilt,” the series unfolds as a layered reflection on Latin American identity, always unstable, always unfinished. In this back-and-forth, the work underscores both continuity and change: stories that overlap, diverge, and transform.
Latin American Puzzle thus expands Silveira’s longstanding investigation into systems of visual representation, employing scale, absence, and distortion to challenge established hierarchies of power and persistent mythological narratives. Executed in black and white, the series draws on the visual language of media outlets that for decades portrayed Latin America as a tropical paradise, a dangerous frontier, or an object of exotic fascination.
By collapsing time and geography, Silveira creates unexpected encounters, sometimes humorous, sometimes unsettling, that expose the enduring presence of these images. The ellipses in the titles and the puzzle’s unfinished, reconfigurable structure ultimately gesture toward a narrative still in motion: one that resists closure and remains open to reinterpretation.
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