Professor Nicola López '04 and Paula Wilson '05 in 'Becoming Land'

The Albuquerque Museum is hosting three exhibitions focused on contemporary interpretations of the New Mexico landscape. One of these exhibitions is Becoming Land, by Associate Professor and Chair of Visual Arts Nicola López '04 and Paula Wilson '05, which will be on view until February 12, 2023. 

For the exhibition, López has contributed works that build on her time as a Visiting Artist at the Albuquerque Museum. The works, as the museum’s press release notes, “incorporate structures that appear futuristic and monumental, but are also engulfed by the surrounding landscape.” This effect can be found in the two panels that comprise NeverWild (diptych), (cyanotype on mulberry paper, 39 inches x 91 inches, 2021) as well as in the collographs and the charcoal drawings on photographs. Within the collographs, such as Apparition III (21.5" x 31.25", 2019) the architectural structures often found in López’s work appear at once futuristic and desolate. Depending on the viewer’s inclinations, one may interpret the structures as plans for the desert’s future landscape, or as the remnants of what was, very long ago, a human structure in that landscape that collapsed. It is precisely because the context of the structures in the collographs is suggested yet never offered in full that the thread of time and narrative is interrupted. This interruption brings forth the chance to pause and to seriously consider the impacts of human activity on any piece of land.   

Alongside López’s works, Wilson is presenting several large scale prints, rendered both on fabric and on paper, in which figures “contain the landscape, integrating different perspectives, seasons, and relationships,” the museum’s press release explains. The scale in some of Wilson’s works also lend a sense of interior containment. For instance, Yucca Rising, (woodblock print, relief print, trace monoprint, monotype, acrylic, and oil on muslin, 188 inches x 188 inches 2021) which hangs on one of the gallery’s walls, depicts an outstretched figure bearing a mix of fragile organic materials and inorganic materials. The figure stands upright, it’s face unseen but looking down upon itself. Seeing the figure’s face downturned, one is inclined to feel a poignant tension between awe and resignation. 

Making use of multiple materials and complex narratives, the works in the exhibition inhabit the museum’s galleries as much as they serve as a testament to the land and people’s presence on it, a presence that often results in significant alterations, technological detritus, and abandonment. 

Nicola López (b. 1975) received her BA and MFA at Columbia University in 1998 and 2004, respectively. Her work has been exhibited widely both in the United States and internationally at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Denver Museum of Art; and the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. López’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY. She was commissioned to create a temporary site-specific work for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. 

Paula Wilson (b. 1975) is a mixed media artist who employs sculpture, collage, painting, printmaking and installation to examine women’s identities through the lens of cultural history. Wilson received a BFA from Washington University in 1998 and a MFA from Columbia University in 2005. She has had one-person exhibitions at 516 Arts, Albuquerque, NM; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; and Galleria Suzy Shammah in Milan, Italy. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NY; Fred Snitzer Gallery, Miami; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, among others. Wilson has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Giverny Residency from the Art Production Fund in Giverny, France.