Nicola López and Paula Wilson: Becoming Land

Nicola López and Paula Wilson: Becoming Land presented contemporary interpretations of the New Mexico desert landscapes that embody an ecological perspective and emphasize the relationships between humans and their surrounding environment. Paula Wilson’s prints and fabric-based installations integrated and centered figures, expanding beyond the classical genre of landscape while Nicola López’s prints imagined abandoned, futuristic structures centered in New Mexico scenes. Both artists explored new ways of seeing the land.

Becoming Land was presented simultaneously with three other exhibitions featuring historic and contemporary artists that engage the natural world through diverse depictions of the landscape. Shi Guorui: Ab/Sense-Pre/Sense and Kiki Smith: From the Creek offered specific responses to the landscapes and work of Thomas Cole presented in Thomas Cole: Memory and Inspiration. The works of Wilson and López featured in Becoming Land presented a broader conversation with the works of Cole. Becoming Land suggested that artworks reflect the artist’s and broader culture’s ideas around power, ownership, and access to land.

López and Wilson’s work centered the New Mexico landscape and expands beyond traditional views and perspectives of the land as it has been depicted by artists in the United States. In Wilson’s work, which included large scale prints on fabric as well as prints on paper, the landscape was an ever-changing space full of relationships between animals, plants, and humans. Her work included large-scale figures that contain the landscape, integrating different perspectives, seasons, and relationships. Other works showed current technologies such as phones and headphones as part of the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. Wilson’s work offered a nuanced exploration of the sublimity of nature that incorporates not only plants and animals, but also technology and debris which are part of human’s evolving connection to the land.

Both Wilson and López’s works challenged the viewer’s notions of scale. López’s works incorporated structures that appear futuristic and monumental, but were also engulfed by the surrounding landscape. Though there were no figures present, the works emphasized the ongoing human interactions and interventions in the landscape through time. López’s prints appeared as abandoned sites and suggest that there is no untouched wilderness left in the world. The forms of the landscape were interjected with structures that appear substantial, but also fragile and ephemeral integrating the past and the present with the suggestion of a desolate future. López’s works included a large cyanotype as well as collagraphs and a charcoal drawing on printed photographs.

López and Wilson’s works continue an ongoing dialogue around environmentalism and explore the agency that artists have in raising questions and concerns about the environment. The artists gave attention to the desert landscape and their works suggested that the way we see the land reflects our relationship to it.