Some works ask to be understood. Others ask to be felt first.
UNDER PRESSURE brings together Guadalupe Reyna, Tali Halpern, and Kristin Reger, three artists whose practices are grounded in transformation.
Working across encaustic painting, fiber, beadwork, sculpture, and installation, they create works that hold experience physically within their materials. Wax bears the trace of heat. Thread records hours of labor. Suspended forms stretch, knot, and gather under tension. Across the exhibition, materials become witnesses.
What a viewer encounters first is material under pressure. Reyna burns, seals, preserves, and builds through wax. Halpern stitches, beads, layers, and accumulates through fiber. Reger stretches, suspends, knots, and binds through sculptural form.
All three artists are makers of tension—not tension as conflict, but tension as a physical condition: the pull between vulnerability and protection, collapse and endurance, exposure and concealment, pleasure and discomfort.
Guadalupe Reyna’s encaustic paintings emerge from a process of burning, layering, and preservation. Using beeswax gathered from local hives, she builds luminous surfaces that evoke skin, landscape, memory, and shelter at once.
Heat becomes both destructive and restorative. Wax carries its own history—communal, protective, fragile—and her paintings reveal the marks of transformation embedded within it. What appears wounded is also preserved.
Tali Halpern is a queer fiber artist who approaches slow craft as a sacred form of world-building. They create rich, layered works that explore themes often considered taboo or contradictory, including sexuality and spirituality, desirability and shame, club culture and addiction recovery. Their dazzling, multi-process textile works collage found objects and text, interpreting them as divine messages in an effort to reach others navigating profound internal struggles related to self-worth, mental illness, and substance use. Their aesthetic is informed by lived experience within queer and punk countercultures, while their labor-intensive and meditative process grounds what may appear to be controlled chaos in meticulous care and attention.
Halpern received a BFA in Studio Arts from Hampshire College in 2016 and was awarded a Visionary Award for their MFA at SAIC in 2022. They first learned weaving while assisting fourth-generation Navajo weaver Melissa Cody and currently work as Studio Technician at LMRM (“Loom Room”), specializing in TC2 digital Jacquard looms. Their work has been exhibited at de boer, Los Angeles; BravinLee, New York City; Chicago Art Department; Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago; Twelveten Gallery at NADA Miami; and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. They are a recipient of the 2026 Re/Match Award.
Kristin Reger (Chicago, 1984) is a visual artist working primarily in sculpture. She earned her MFA and PhD in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 2016 and 2023, respectively. Reger completed the educational program at SOMA, Mexico City, in 2016 and received her Bachelor of Arts from DePaul University, Chicago, in 2006. She has taught sculpture at the undergraduate level at the School of Painting, Printmaking and Sculpture “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City.
Solo exhibitions include: Wetwarp, Aparador, Los Angeles (2022); Burst, Salón Silicon (2021); IUDUIUDUI, ZONA MACO, Rava Projects, Mexico City (2021); New Works, Von Ammon Co, New York (2019); Genesis, Enrique Guerrero Gallery, Mexico City (2018); and Milktooth, DAAB, New York (2018).
is committed to promoting the appreciation and recognition of contemporary art through a dynamic and historically grounded aesthetic. Since its founding in 2022, the gallery has worked to build a vibrant artistic community, representing emerging and mid-career artists from Latin America whose works explore the boundaries of form, texture, and materiality. Through sustained and dedicated engagement with contemporary practices, TRA aims to position its artists’ productions within the international art circuit.
TRA challenges conventional perspectives and encourages the exploration of innovative artistic forms, prioritizing the creative autonomy of artists and fostering an environment where breaking boundaries and engaging closely with the public are central.
With headquarters in Miami and José Ignacio, a temporary programming in Buenos Aires, and a forthcoming new location in the same city, TRA seeks to foster dialogue between local and international art scenes. Its mission is to create meaningful exchanges that reaffirm its commitment to connecting the region’s cultural richness with the global stage, generating an impact that transcends borders through a program that is rooted yet constantly moving and evolving in dialogue.
In 2025, TRA consolidates this vision by participating in five key international art fairs — arteBA, ArtBo, BA Photo, Paris Photo and NADA Miami — expanding visibility and collecting opportunities for its artists and strengthening its presence in the global contemporary art scene.
