Laura Veles Drey’s Artpace exhibition Nothing Grows in A Straight Line explores themes of migration, labor, storytelling, and connection to the land. The multi-part installation mines ancestral knowledge, utilizing familiar materials such as paper ties, plastic produce bins, and embroidered textiles. Drey creates haptic sculptural works that contemplate hybridity, bio/cultural diversity, and the intersection of nature and labor.
As visitors enter the space, they encounter vignettes—fragments of a story that interweave time, memory, and place. Central to the exhibition is Meadow, a large rectangular sculpture made of green plastic produce bins woven and embroidered to soften their industrial presence. The shape of the piece recalls American memorial pools, such as the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, while also mimicking fields of grass or meadows. Paired with native plants and pollinators, Meadow creates a striking contrast between revered cultural monuments and the natural ecosystems that sustain and nourish all life.
Approximately eight thousand paper ties hang in arranged rows on the west wall. Their red, white, and blue hues reference the American flag. Drey transforms the symbol into a curtain, a divider, and a space for reflection by rooting each curtain into the soil, evoking processes of weaving and harvest. Beyond the curtain, a photograph taken from a moving car captures the landscape of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Passerby: Americana considers cultivated farmland, drawing attention to the laborers working the land and their histories.
Abstracted images from archival video footage are printed on paper and combined with remnants of packaging materials like burlap and plastic mesh bags. These elements are sewn together, forming a rhizomatic structure that drapes across the space—soft, billowy, and expansive, much like a living garden that grows in unexpected directions. Ancestral Garden draws inspiration from Drey’s grandmother’s backyard, a space deeply ingrained in familial memory.
Poetry on the northern walls deepens the exhibition’s narrative alongside warm spatial lighting reminiscent of sunrise and sunset. A soundscape plays throughout the space—recordings of Drey’s time in Mexico when she lived in the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca mountains for a previous residency. Like the poetry, the sounds are soft and unintrusive, the whisper of another thread in the weave of her story.
This exhibition continues Drey’s previous explorations of migration and its intersections with race, class, labor, and geography. At Artpace, Drey creates palimpsests by manipulating materials, softening the edges of material and the memory itself. Nothing Grows in A Straight Line engages with themes of connection—between land, labor, and migration—while emphasizing the importance of storytelling, archiving, and reclaiming histories.
—Ada Smith Genitempo, Manager of Residencies and Exhibitions
