Opening on August 2, 2025, Miami Gallery Mahara + Co presents the group exhibition The Realities We Dream, curated by Heike Dempster and Ross Karlan. The summer exhibition highlights six contemporary artists: Pedro Delgado (Brazil), Ernesto Gutiérrez Moya (Cuba), Jodi Minnis (Bahamas), Pedro Troncoso (Dominican Republic/ NYC), Manuela Viera-Gallo (Chile), and Pedro Zhang (Portugal) and finds its roots in the idea that “the only reality is that which we dream,” often attributed to Portuguese poet and author Fernando Pessoa. As such, these artists find a sense of wonder in the world around them, evoking emotional tension through their incredible balance of the extraordinary and the mundane, or blurring the line between reality and dreams. Through incredible technical skill, each artist pulls from personal, generational, or cultural experiences and memories, while at the same time illustrating — and subverting — the universalities that transcend objects and feelings.
Portuguese painter Pedro Zhang uses the medium of painting as a means of grappling with nature, time, and space. In his muted, subtle, and emotionally-driven paintings, Zhang turns to every-day objects found in homes or nature in order to displace them from a certain time or place such that their uniqueness and memory surpass a mere moment and a given reality.
Jodi Minnis explores how spaces and objects—particularly those shaped by Caribbean identity and memory—become vessels of absence. In new work exhibited in the show, Minnis turns to the surreal realm of her grandmother’s garden, a space overrun with the mysticism of the Caribbean’s natural environment and infused with sensations of femininity and motherhood.
Continuing with the garden motif, Ernesto Gutierrez Moya’s romanticist and dreamlike portrayal of gardens and fountains calls to mind an era and land that are both far from today’s world. Gutierrez Moya uses these motifs as an exploration of beauty, art history, and—most notably—mythology. The artist, like his predecessors, invokes a sensation of otherworldliness into the gardens and fountains in his work, as if the site of an encounter between two realms.
Pedro Troncoso examines diasporic narratives, often considering domestic or discarded items, as he searches for connection, echoing the fragmented nature of inherited memory and cultural lineage. Furthermore, Troncoso’s work channels fantasies and
imaginations that stem from his own life experiences or culturally-inherited memories, each of which become a part of the fabric of his own life today.
Pedro Delgado turns to the fluid nature of his home region in Northeastern Brazil, known for its unique topography, ecosystem, and culture. Delgado creates a wistful and dreamlike profile of his home in his signature impressionistic style. His depiction of the beaches and gardens mixed with idealized notions of Brazilian masculinity exist in an in-between space where the world around him meets the world he aspires to create.
Finally, Manuela Viera-Gallo’s sculptural contributions to the exhibition are surrealist interpretations of birds imbued with both political and social interpretations. Viera-Gallo’s work hovers the line between the real and imagined identities of the birds she sculpts that in her own words “departs from absurdity to manipulate and distort known symbols and imagery into an allegorical, fantastical and darkly comical framework.”
