The evolution of the man-made landscape will be the focus of a lecture by artist Nicola López on Sept. 13 at 5:30 p.m. in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. López will discuss her work in printmaking, drawing and installation as part of the Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series in the school of art.
López’ work reconfigures contemporary, primarily urban, landscapes. Her interest in describing “place” stems from her extensive traveling and studying in other countries, particularly Mexico, Peru and Morocco, and her studies as an anthropology major at Columbia University, where she received her bachelor’s degree in 1998 and master’s degree in visual arts in 2004.
According to López, she uses the visual language of cartography to delve into the ideas behind the “easy mobility, constant communication, imposition of structure, insistence on growth and the glorification of technology that have come to be so characteristic of society today.
“I use the language of printmaking to address the processes of automation and mass production that have brought today’s world into existence,” she said. “The specific media of intaglio, woodblock and drawing that I choose to work with, however, are still closely linked to the artist’s hand and allow the work to be about my own attempt as an individual to come up with a system of navigating this overwhelming landscape instead of simply consuming one of the pre-fabricated, mass-produced and mass-marketed versions, of which there are so many.”
Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and the Denver Art Museum.