Natural entropy is a tool—and a sustainable ethos—for ten artists in Abstracting Nature at Albuquerque Museum.
Abstracting Nature
June 21–October 12, 2025
Albuquerque Museum
We may think of abstraction as a uniquely human endeavor, but the fact is that the natural world has its own forms of this: entropy, decay, and rot, for instance, the processes by which concrete and functional things become less so. When artists try to engage with the natural world in their artwork, they often run up against these natural laws—mark making, that primordial human act of signifying “I was here,” is necessarily antagonized by the obliterating march of time. But when artists are able to meet that obliteration unflinchingly, as a feature of their work rather than a bug, it opens the door to some peculiar horizons.
Abstracting Nature features ten artists with connections to New Mexico whose work is informed—or, in some cases, quite literally embodied—by their natural environments. Glass, already an example of a natural material abstracted, takes on less familiar textures and forms in Judy Tuwaletstiwa’s work. The artist fires sand at low temperatures, creating a soft, opaque glass that is not only functionally useless as glass, but so delicate that it is slowly flaking back into its component material right there in the exhibition. At the back of the gallery, Yoshiko Shimano’s giant canvases are filled with the frenetic energy of whitewater, each of them layered with so many small, repeating prints that the sheer amount of visual information begins to blur the boundaries of any coherent forms that might emerge—like an obsessive palimpsest, crushed under the weight of so much ink.
Ironically, it is the artworks that so directly flirt with their own ephemerality that stick with me the most, like Tuwaletstiwa’s crumbling glass and the disintegrating adobe bricks in Joanna Keane Lopez’s Ghost Spell (2023). They seem to suggest that leaving fewer lasting marks on the landscape might be something of a virtue. A radical thought, that.
