Regina Silveira, Outgrown (Tracks and Shadows)

Regina Silveira’s tracks as first encountered on the outside wall of PNCA are a maddeningly seductive advertisement of themselves. They link street to gallery and intertwine promotion with presentation setting up a tension that is as much about the narrowing margins between t-shirt graphics and art installation as it is about the amoebic relationship between time and space.
The flat black, meticulously carved vinyl tracks swoop, distort, shrink and magnify along the white walls. There is a double deception here. First, the tracks seem to travel impossible roads. The paradigm of one-point perspective is a road disappearing geometrically on the horizon. In Silveira’s work we face roads that seem more likely the paths of a pricked helium balloon then a Range Rover. The second deception is in the tracks themselves. Tracks almost only occur in messy places, mud, snow, sand, emerging from a puddle or mis-stepping in a freshly poured sidewalk. They are tactile, three dimensional reconfigurations of the landscape, impressions. Here, they are prints.
That the tracks terminate in toy cars painted metallic silver and mounted (in most cases to the wall) is the biggest disappointment. They are a distraction or worse an explanation. The very intrigue of a track is that it is the shadow of a shadow, extended in time and sculpted in space. Behind this door there is a curtain and behind that curtain a veil and behind that veil…I don’t want to know.
This is the viewer’s chance to participate, to paint the face and write the story. The more she layers tracks, crosses walls and defies corners the more I walk their impression, kneeling at times to check the contours. Saw blade: the car is fast, made to handle sharp turns on rain drenched television commercials. Ticket Tape: a blue-collar earth moving muscle. Wood Grain: a family sedan, the kids are young. Dad is old enough to have long since parked his Camero in the garage but not so old that he’s roaring off to the latest retro-restaurant.
Where the tracks are contained in white, I feel cheated, as if some manifest road trip were cut short. I want to keep driving, to blacken the walls beyond recognition, indeed to achieve blackout. Then we will understand the nature of the automobile- that ball of momentum that encloses with equal measure, individuality, and collusion, empowerment and resignation, freedom and self-destruction.
posted by Marty Schnapf