Careyes Foundation art residency
Las simples cosas
by Viviana Reyes A.
Through drawings, found objects, painting, and installation, Reyes gathers the small fragments that shape a life: memory, loss, gestures, and things kept without knowing why.
The exhibition remains open-ended: an inventory in motion, inviting new encounters with children and communities along the coast of Jalisco.
About the artist
Viviana Reyes Arellano was born in Zapopan, Mexico, in 1988. She holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Instituto Cultural de Aguascalientes, specializing in sculpture.
Her multidisciplinary practice moves across drawing, painting, performance, video, and installation. Her work has been exhibited at Museo Regional de Guadalajara, Museo Raúl Anguiano, Sala GAM in Mexico City, and Arte Careyes, where she has exhibited since 2015.
Based in Puerto Vallarta since 2019, Reyes works from found objects and fragments of personal memory. Her practice returns to questions of body, identity, and territory, often transforming everyday materials into intimate visual records. Alongside her artistic work, she has participated in community-based projects including a family-run fonda, a neighborhood tour, and an urban collective.
About the exhibitionAt the center of the exhibition, Dibujos al aire gathers Viviana Reyes’s personal archive into a suspended copper mobile: drawings, found objects, letters, and small rescued fragments turning slowly in space. Made with tubing from her family’s business, the work transforms a material once used to carry gas into a vessel for paper, memory, and change.
Nearby, cut-paper figures, portraits, and balanced stone-like forms trace gestures of movement, intimacy, and loss. Referencing the artist’s brother and moments held close by her family, these works resist a single narrative. Instead, they unfold as memory does—through fragments, associations, and the small images that return in dreams.
las simples cosas
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las simples cosas 〰️
Las simples cosas extends the exhibition into a shared space for attention, making, and gathering. It began on August 15 with a tea ceremony led by Viviana Reyes and children from coastal communities; elements from that first encounter remain in the gallery as traces of a process that continues to unfold.
Over the coming months, participants will walk, collect, draw, and paint together—simple actions that make room for what might otherwise go unnoticed. The laboratory builds on more than a decade of artistic work with children supported by The Careyes Foundation Art Program.
