Stone's Throw // Press Release
STONE’S THROW
ARTE DE SANACION
ARTE DE RESISTENCIA
Opening reception // January 17, 2020, 6-9 pm
On view through February 28, 2020
The Anderson
Virginia Commonwealth University
907 1/2 W. Franklin St., Richmond, VA, USA
Artists // Hellen Ascoli (Guatemala / USA) // Leonardo González (Honduras) // Alejandro de la Guerra (Nicaragua) // Melissa Guevara (El Salvador) // Jorge de León (Guatemala) // Mario Alberto López (Guatemala) // Andrea Monroy Palacios (Guatemala) // Moe Penders (El Salvador / USA) // Abigail Reyes (El Salvador) // Adán Vallecillo (Honduras).
Curator // Laura August, PhD (USA / Guatemala)
Opening on January 17 at The Anderson, Stone’s Throw: Arte de Sanación, Arte de Resistencia includes recent work by ten artists from Central America. Working in textile, performance, video, photography, installation, social practice, and drawing, these artists reference a regional discourse around themes of resistance and healing, responding specifically to their points of intersection. What does it look like to resist structures of power that violate human rights? How might we heal from the effects of violent systems as they impact our bodies, our communities, and the landscapes that surround us?
The exhibition takes its title from an action by Nicaraguan artist Alejandro de la Guerra. In Batalla de los cuarzos (Battle of the quartzes), de la Guerra uses a slingshot to throw quartz stones at a monument to Nicaraguan hero of independence, Andrés Castro. The piece signals the artist’s challenge to historical narratives of power, while also gesturing toward processes of healing with the curative properties of the stone.
Works by Melissa Guevara, Leonardo González, and Mario Alberto López engage the natural world to understand human processes of grief, loss, and recovery. Guevara’s series of new videos, made during residencies at Lake Atitlán in Guatemala and Flora Ars + Natura in Colombia take mud as their subject. In one video, she watches as dirt and water combine to make a thick paste before they disintegrate, offering a metaphorical journey of construction and dissolution. González’s hydroponic installation, Flowers Also Grow in Hell pays tribute to Berta Cáceres, the environmental rights activist who was assassinated in 2016. Based in Antigua, Guatemala, López has been working closely in meditation practices with families recovering from the devastating 2018 eruption of Volcán del Fuego. Using the Rose of Jericho plant to cleanse the air of atmospheric and emotional toxins, López creates drawings from the sounds the resilient plant makes as it opens and closes.
Andrea Monroy Palacios and Adán Vallecillo both intervene in the processes of damage and restoration that plants and bodies of water experience. In her recent textile work, Monroy uses natural pigments to dye her threads and woven installations. Processing grief by a sustained engagement with her family’s garden, she collects the blood-like sap of the banano plant, each time she cuts it. Vallecillo’s ongoing Pintura Mural project involves collecting organic and inorganic matter from rivers damaged by human pollution; from these materials, he makes pigment to paint a mural.
Hellen Ascoli’s recent weaves reference specific historical textiles. In Ya Te Vi, she cites a textile from Guatemala, currently in the Cooper Hewitt collection. The woven text (I already saw you) hints at a lurking sense of paranoia, a constant feeling of being watched. Ascoli’s research into textile history works to recuperate stories and designs of weavers, while also honoring the ways that a weave wraps a body, both in caretaking and in grief. Her series of work Amanecí temprano para peinar el mundo (I woke early to comb the world) documents her voyage to the Cuchamatanes mountains in Huehuetenango, where she wrapped herself in a textile woven to her body’s dimensions, reaching to the sky in a cultural gesture of remembering the dead.
Jorge de León and Moe Penders both consider the visceral nature of violent loss. In his video performance Estudios de luz y sombra, de León climbs inside a recently butchered steer, wrapping its carcass around his nude body. Penders returns to their homeland of El Salvador, asking questions about the death of their father, at the height of the Salvadoran civil war. Revisiting the site of his fatal accident, the artist makes a unique photographic print from the headlights of his car. The print’s swirling traces of light and dark bear a relationship to the traces of memory and forgetting in a place scarred by war.
With her signature series of Popular Poetry, Abigail Reyes draws from the expressions of the street and market. Always combining double entendre with the rapidly-moving encounters of these public sites, Reyes catches these ephemeral poems of the everyday. With Quedé curada, the wordplay combines exhaustion (the expression is roughly: I’ve had it) with the nuances of the verb curar: to be healed, to be curated, to mature.
Stone’s Throw is an investigation into resistance and healing from a region scarred by U.S. intervention, xenophobic immigration policies, and long histories of war and economic exploitation. As these artists interrogate the ways we circumvent and recover from structural systems designed to disempower and violate, they remind us of Central America’s closeness, both geographic and political, to the United States. Seen together, these artists call for a restorative future, one marked by the knowledge learned from legacies—personal, communal, and national—of violence and its deep scars.
The Anderson is open Monday through Friday, 12 pm to 7 pm and Saturday, 12 pm to 5 pm. For more information, contact The Anderson at (804) 828-7720 or visit https://arts.vcu.edu/programs/theanderson/.