Shifting Perspectives: Nicola LÓpez's Haunted

Shifting Perspectives

Nicola López’s geologic forms reflect New Mexico

THE ALBUQUERQUE MUSEUM LOBBY SEEMS enlivened thanks to the installation of Nicola López’s Haunted. The large-scale installation features a site specific landscape that vibrantly changes throughout the day.

López is this year’s Visiting Artist, a program funded in part by a grant from the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Her three-dimensional piece includes collaged, printed, and hand-drawn elements. It creates a landscape where natural and human-built features intertwine. Video projections animate the work. The piece changes as light shifts in the lobby space from different weather conditions and from morning to evening.

The lobby seems an appropriate place for López’s work. Her art focuses on 'place' and stems from an interest in urban planning, architecture, and anthropology; it's further fueled by time working and traveling in different landscapes. According to the artist, there is no longer any such thing as nature unmarked by humanity. Indeed, humanity haunts nature with what we inflict on the environment in the name of progress.

López, who now lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Columbia University in New York, works in installation, drawing, and printmaking. Her work often has an architectural feel, as evidenced by two prints the Museum recently acquired from the

ON VIEW

HAUNTED

Through June 2021 Watch a video interview with the artist at cabq.gov/haunted

Nicola López Born Santa Fe, NM 1975 Lives Brooklyn, NY Haunted 2020 Monotype on mylar, projectors with steel mounts and video lent by the artist. Supported by the Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community. Photos by Stephan Hutchins

series Ideal Structures for a Dubious Future, shown in conjunction with Trinity: Reflections on the Bomb on view on the Museum’s website. The Works on Paper gallery features a small selection from the online exhibition. The prints are part of a project which connected López with technical support from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

During the COVID-19 quarantine, López stayed with her mother in Santa Fe. A modification in her artistic process—working in a makeshift studio, with monoprint, and the nature of the New Mexico landscape—is evident in Haunted. The strata of geologic formations layer and spread across the lobby wall, the representation of textures part of the printing process. Videos of human impact—pipes coming out of a rock formation, for example—underscore López's thesis that the human footprint exists even in remote places. “If you look at López’s typical visual language, it’s very urban and architectural,” says Josie Lopez, Ph.D., curator of art. “This piece is very much about New Mexico landscape, with texture and color on multiple layers. She is working in different circumstances but also grappling with what it means to be back in New Mexico. We also acquired for the collection Objects for a Dubious Future,” says Lopez. “It shows the artist’s process of engaging with architectural landscapes. That, too, was a New Mexico project, based on the Trinity blast.”

The Visiting Artist program has featured contemporary artists—both well established and emerging—with a connection to New Mexico. Among those featured were Gronk, Virgil Ortiz, Catalina Delgado-Trunk, Paul Sarkisian, and most recently, Karl Hofmann. The annual program provides an invited artist the opportunity to reimagine and activate the Museum's lobby; some artists create works specifically for the space. The program includes displaying the artist's work for one year, public engagement, and artist talks. The program aims to provide a bridge between the artistic practice of the visiting artist and the public's experience of contemporary art.