a way to mend

a way to mend presents recent work by 19 Gulf Coast artists whose work engages relationships between abstraction and landscape, and whose practices connect art with processes of healing. Accompanied with texts commissioned from five writers, a way to mend studies emotional wayfinding, personal and communal protection, solitude, spirituality, and transformation.

Curated by Houston-based artist and writer Doug Welsh, the exhibition is anchored by an enigmatic 1949 painting by Forrest Bess (Bay City, TX, 1911-1977). A self-taught artist, Bess’s paintings were connected to his experiences of “visions,” and his close study of psychology, gender, and dream worlds. Several recurring motifs in Bess’s visions appear in his paintings, including ovoid forms and wishbone shapes. As Bess scholar Clare Elliott has observed, by studying these symbols, Bess hoped to reveal a “collective unconscious,” and to illuminate universal truths. Similarly, the artists included in a way to mend engage with patterns and structures that bridge human and non-human natures; they share an insistence upon the entanglement of healing practices with larger philosophical and formal abstractions. In particular, a way to mend considers a Gulf Coast attention to resilience, transformation, and repair.

The exhibition features work by Isela Aguirre, Forrest Bess, Sebastien Boncy, Crasis (Andy P. Davis and Anne Lukins), Julie DeVries, Garrett Griffin, Stephanie Gonzalez, Shangyi Hua, Jonathan Paul Jackson, Terrell James, Emily Peacock, Mitch Pengra, Alexis Pye, Gerardo Rosales, JR Roykovich, Eric Schnell, Adrienne Simmons and Benji Stiles.

The exhibition also includes analytic and poetic texts by writers Clare Elliott, Sarah Fisher, Liz Gates, Adam Marnie, and Emma Timbers.