As part of Intervals, an ongoing series, the Guggenheim Museum presented Brooklyn-based artist Nicola Lopez with a site-specific sculptural collage environment in the rotunda, titled Landscape X: Under Construction.
Conceived to reflect the spirit of today’s most innovative practices, Intervals invites a diverse range of artists to create new work for the interstitial spaces of the museum, in individual galleries, or beyond the physical confines of the building. This exhibition marks Lopez’s first solo institutional presentation in New York.
Nicola Lopez (b. 1975, Santa Fe, New Mexico) creates sculptural forms and environmental installations with woodblock-printed elements, often constructed out of Mylar. For her Intervals project, she engages the Tyvek scrim that temporarily encloses and conceals the atrium of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Guggenheim Museum. The site-specific intervention of Landscape X plays with the conditions of anticipation and imminence by appropriating the visual vocabulary of construction sites. Orange danger barriers, chain-link fencing, and barbed wire are translated via woodblocks that have been carved with irregularities and distortions and printed on pliable materials. The cacophony of forms, including other citations of urban infrastructure, not only signals the hidden activity, but also presents flux and process as phases to contemplate.
The devices of containment, separation, and definition are repurposed to alter our spatial experience. Landscape X encourages trespassing, or straying into the wrong lane, providing a visual field that leads the eye from wall to ceiling to floor. Simulated road markings, contorted in response to the architecture, defy organization. Combining printed elements with light industrial materials, Lopez composes images inspired by the abstracted aerial view of cityscapes, capturing the quasi-scientific element of urban planning frequently described by the physiological metaphor of veins and arteries. Lopez utilizes extension cords, lights, and tape to draw and sculpt. Negative spaces cut from printed Mylar “fencing,” retaining halos of pigment, punctuate the transition between two levels. Another section traces every edge of the existing architecture with blue painter’s tape, paying homage while exploring the building’s idiosyncrasies and overlooked details.
Landscape X invites the viewer to embark on a journey. Whether the route is ascending, descending, or takes a more haphazard course, all signs encourage the consideration of place and space, the movement of one’s body through the site, and the ways in which our surroundings are organized. Lopez has created a situation where the exterior floods the interior, the grid invades the spiral, and distortion trumps order.
