RELICS, FIBS, TRASH, AND TREASURES

 

Hawthorn Contemporary's inaugural exhibition opening of Relics, Fibs, Trash, and Treasures features Brooklyn-based artist Nicola López. López’s work incorporates installation, printmaking and drawing to create structures that visually conceptualize the evolution of human built landscapes.

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Relics, Fibs, Trash, and Treasures includes an expansive installation titled Salvage as well as six prints from López’s Urban Transformation series. Salvage, a continuously evolving index of the artist’s semiotics, incorporates prints, photographs and drawings intermingled with found objects. Bits of chain link fencing, orange mesh barriers, barbed wire and scaffolding are systematically taped and pinned to the wall. With specific attention to the individual materials, we are able to examine their history and reimagine the salvaged item’s future.

 

Born in Santa Fe, NM, Nicola López lives and works in Brooklyn and teaches at Columbia University in New York City.  Through her work in installation, drawing and printmaking, López describes and reconfigures our contemporary—primarily urban—landscape.  Her focus on describing ‘place’ stems from an interest in urban planning, architecture and anthropology and it has been fueled by time spent working and traveling in different landscapes.  López has received support for her work through a NYFA Fellowhsip in Drawing/Printmaking/Book Arts and a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others.  Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally: it been included in group exhibitions at museums including MoMA in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in LA, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and the Denver Art Museum in Denver, CO and featured in solo exhibitions at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, WI and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.  López’s site-specific work “Un-building Things” is currently on view the Balcony Lounge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY.

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