The Realities We Dream, a summer exhibition at Mahara+Co, bends heat into haze and memory into myth. Co-curated by Heike Dempster and Ross Karlan, the exhibition draws inspiration from Fernando Pessoa’s idea that “the only reality is that which we dream,” inviting viewers into a dreamscape where personal history and cultural lineage are reshaped through material and form.
The exhibition opened on August 2 and continues to draw attention for its compelling exploration of memory, myth, and identity. This thoughtfully curated collection features six artists from Brazil, Cuba, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Portugal, each navigating a dreamlike landscape shaped by personal history and cultural imagination. Through diverse mediums including painting, sculpture, and assemblage, The Realities We Dream examines how memory is constructed, distorted, and reimagined, offering powerful reflections on diaspora, femininity, and the mythologizing of place.
Jodi Minnis builds an altar from her grandmother’s garden, turning it into a stage where memory and mysticism converge. Here, Caribbean femininity blossoms into surrealism, and echoes of motherhood are embedded in domestic forms. Her objects seem to absorb time, turning absence into something tangible and allowing personal history to expand into a broader meditation on presence.
Familiarity becomes unfamiliar in Pedro Zhang’s paintings. Anchoring his practice in objects drawn from domestic and natural environments, he strips them of their immediate context and recasts them as quiet studies of permanence. Through muted tones and a restrained emotional register, Zhang uses painting to probe larger questions of time, memory, and spatial resonance.
Ernesto Gutiérrez Moya travels similar ground, but through the lens of myth. His dreamlike fountains and flora evoke not what was, but what should have been. Time folds. Beauty lingers. In his work, art history flirts with folklore, forming a visual language steeped in mythology.
Pedro Delgado blurs Northeastern Brazil into dreamy impressions. Masculinity, coastline, and garden meet in saturated brushstrokes, rendered in his signature impressionistic style. The region becomes a longing, rendered not as it is but as it aches to be.
Through fragmented assemblages of everyday and discarded objects, Pedro Troncoso maps the complex terrain of diasporic memory. His work challenges conventional narratives by embracing the non-linear, vivid, and deeply personal nature of recollection. Drawing from both inherited histories and personal experience, Troncoso’s art becomes a dynamic reconstruction of identity, one built from pieces that resist easy order but speak to resilience and connection.
Manuela Viera-Gallo conjures birds that resemble political cartoons caught mid-transformation. Her surrealist sculptures navigate the space between satire and symbolism, radiating a captivating mix of charm and unease. By manipulating and distorting familiar imagery, her work creates an allegorical, fantastical world where humor sharpens into incisive political and social critique. Hovering between the real and the imagined, these figures give allegory a biting edge and invite viewers to reconsider the boundaries of identity and power.
The works in The Realities We Dream pulse with heat-soaked memory and deliberate distortion. Each artist treats Fernando Pessoa’s dictum as a process, a way of reshaping recollection through material and form. The garden recurs as artists like Minnis and Moya approach space as a threshold for femininity, mythology, and quiet rupture. Troncoso and Delgado weave personal lineage into objects and landscapes, giving emotional texture to diasporic experience and imagined geography.
Elsewhere, Zhang’s muted paintings suspend time, turning everyday artifacts into subtle studies of permanence and dislocation. Viera-Gallo’s sculptures sharpen familiar symbols into biting satire, their surrealist bodies drifting between charm and discomfort. Across the exhibition, memory is handled like clay; malleable, tactile, marked by use. These pieces confront memory head-on, illuminating the tension between what we inherit and what we choose to carry forward.
WHAT? The Realities We Dream
WHEN? Runs through Summer
WHERE? Mahara+Co Contemporary Art Gallery 224 NW 71st St Miami, FL 33150
MORE INFO: https://www.instagram.com/mahara_and_co/
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