R.A.W. by Nicola López
2009
Woodcut on Mylar
Patron: The Eleanor and Henry Hitchcock Foundation
New Mexico-born artist Nicola López’s often uses woodcut printmaking techniques as a starting point for her installations. For R.A.W., she printed aerial views of highways onto Mylar, then cut out the shapes and affixed them to the gallery’s walls and ceiling.
These images of highways seemed like the perfect thing to use in this space because they talk about the way that human technology crawls over geographical space. It’s a metaphor for our encroachment of space. They become almost like an organism, something that’s growing, something that has its own life. They’re like a neural system—there are centers of activity that branch out into more sparse areas.
López’s installation is located in a gallery with high ceilings and sloping walls on level four of the Hamilton Building. The artist thanks Caren Golden Fine Arts, New York, and Ten Grand Press, Brooklyn
© Nicola López. Photos by Jeff Wells.
Meet the Artist
Born in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1975, Nicola López completed her BA in anthropology at Columbia University in 1998. In 2002 she attended the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine and in 2004 received her MFA in visual arts from Columbia University, as well as an MFA grant from the Joan Mitchell Founda- tion. She has participated in residencies at Assilah Summer Moussem, Assilah, Morocco; La Curtiduria in Oaxaca, Mexico; and the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California. She has been a visiting assistant professor of studio arts at Bard College, New York, since 2007. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
López has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. Her early site-specific installation, A Promising Tomorrow, was shown at the Greater New York 2005 exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, where it was part of the 2006 exhibition Since 2000: Printmaking Now. She has also participated in exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Cusco, Peru. She is represented by Caren Golden Fine Art in New York.
Photo of the artist by Marc Piscotty.
Recent Work
Blighted (at Nerman Museum), 2007. Woodblock and photolitho on mylar, steel armature. Courtesy of the artist and Caren Golden Fine Art; New York, NY.
Junction, 2007. Woodcut and silkscreen on mylar. Courtesy of the artist and Caren Golden Fine Art; New York, NY.
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