Review: The curator's art (Molly Glentzer, The Houston Chronicle)

Art Daybook: The curator’s art
By Molly Glentzer
Published in The Houston Chronicle
April 18, 2017

The piece: "One Stone and the Rain"

The artist: Curator Laura A.L. Wellen, with Hellen Ascoli, Edgar Calel, Manuel Chavajay Moralez, Jorge de León, Reyes Josué Morales and Julio Serrano Echeverría

Where: The Project Space at Lawndale Art Center, during the 2017 Core Exhibition, through Sunday. Wellen and poet Echeverría speak at 2 p.m. on Sunday. Wellen is in another conversation at 12 p.m. on Saturday in the Cavnar Gallery.

Why: We need artists who can move us emotionally and intellectually. And curation is an art, too.

This year's Core Exhibition contains much brainy work that took a serious grasp of technology to achieve. But my favorite "piece" in the Core Exhibition is the one that looks most handmade — Wellen's show-within-the show, "One Stone and the Rain."

A curatorial fellow of the Glassell School's prestigious post-graduate program, Wellen introduces us to six contemporary artists from Guatemala whose media include video, performance and poetry — but it's her perspective that comes through in the curation, one deeply grounded in humanistic values. She gives us an empathetic window into the ways nature has been a steadying influence in Guatemalan culture during decades of armed conflict — and how that spirit is reflected in the country's contemporary art practices.

In the process, she creates the sense of a place that seems simultaneously dreamy and menacing, infused with memory. In "One Stone and The Rain," a lone boatman in a military uniform navigates a lake, with a weapon and a bouquet of flowers at his feet. A sacred "rock bundle" suggests the spiritual fortitude of a group of victimized Maya Q'eqchi women who helped bring military officers to justice for crimes against humanity. An artist encased in a crocheted sack tumbles and rolls across the landscape.

Wellen has more than a casual interest in the place: She divides her time between Guatemala City, where she co-founded the apartment gallery and residency Yvonne, and Houston, where she is involved in a similar enterprise, Francine.

She also writes beautifully: "To embrace physical elements (including water, earth, stone and wind) as the tools for writing about art means to place value and knowledge in another site, to activate seemingly inanimate objects, to connect the natural world with the visual world directly and to embrace the movement and change that they embody," she explains in her catalog essay. 

"Here a stone, here another. Placing two things together ... changes both, and changes the balance of things around them, too. Place a stone in water, and it will not only change the flow of the water, but it will also change its shape over time."

Thoughtful art can have that effect, too.