Returning to Santa Fe after nearly thirty years in New York, multidisciplinary artist Nicola López disorients viewers with layered visual systems that defy resolution.
Melody, rhythm, texture, dissonance, resonance, cadence. These words of musical movement are what come to artist Nicola López’s mind when thinking about her creative practice. This spring, when I visited López’s Santa Fe studio, an airy space at the back of a historic property on Alto Street—one that she only recently learned had been owned by a distant relative of hers, centuries ago—we were discussing music. A Baroque symphony emanated from a small speaker.
Though not formally integrated into her visual art practice—which includes drawing, printmaking, collage, sculpture, site-specific installation, and video—music is a major influence on López’s work. She has a background in dancing and piano, and she’s also casually played accordion for years.
Born and raised in Santa Fe, López moved back to her hometown less than a year ago after nearly thirty years in New York City, studying and then teaching at Columbia University. In López’s transition, a creative quandary has emerged: can the visual languages defining these two divergent places somehow exist in harmony?
Known for her expressive, graphic works that bring metallic urban landscapes to life, López’s often-architectural subjects twist and turn as if they might unfold off the paper, canvas, or hinges and bound towards the viewer. Think sharp geometry, cool tones, and being confronted by the formidable nature of many metropolitan structures—a quality one might otherwise grow numb to after living in cities.
López’s work invites musical metaphors as well: there is dissonance and resonance in how she mixes media, a melodic nature in the way her compositions appear to move, and textural contrasts that might inspire a viewer to tune into their surroundings.
Echoing her recent move, López’s latest series noticeably departs from this urban tenor. Titled Stratigraphy, her current project is grounded in the billion-year-old geological layers that make up the Southwestern terrain. Earthy hues, curvilinear contours, and natural surfaces replace industrial colors, acute angles, and fabricated materials as the basis for the work.
For each piece in Stratigraphy, López starts with a large photograph of stratified rock in Utah, taken by photographer and close friend Joan Myers. López then imposes, interlays, and intersects various colors and patterns that recall city settings reminiscent of her earlier work. While clearly engaging landscape motifs of both the natural and built environments, these tableaus are disorienting, as if López is working against our notions of landscape and crafting versions of an anti-map. At first glance, we don’t quite know where we stand, or even what we’re looking at.
When we think about land, we’re really thinking about landscape.
The artist is exploring the gray area between land and landscape, removing the viewer from a position of certainty. “When we think about land,” she says, “we’re really thinking about landscape,” meaning land through the human lens—land as something seen, made visible, interacted with, controlled. Just as musical terminology constructs an aural tongue that shapes our experience of sound, the term “landscape” implies the visual language created by humans to experience land.
The concept of “land,” on the other hand, rejects the anthropocentrism that is required for people to interact with it. López believes that our understanding of land is “where and how we first access or consume” it. Everything we experience is reliant on our human-specific modes of perception—and the conditions that have shaped that awareness.
Fascinated by how we might interact with the gray area between land and landscape, in Stratigraphy López employs visual language as a tool for the viewer to bear witness to the stripped-down, pure moment of learning. By thoughtfully throwing her audience off balance, the artist offers space for viewers to witness not just what’s in front of them, but how they make sense of it. When looking at works from the series, I subconsciously look for signs to position myself in the scene; I try to distinguish rough rock faces and various delineated strata from designs found in urban infrastructure, including apartment gates and silver chain-link fencing.
In Stratigraphy 11, the facade of an entire building is collaged onto a cliffside that may actually be smaller in size, playing with our shifted sense of perspective between urban and natural canyons. Built and organic patterns such as these are the visual cues we use to understand our environment. “Language doesn’t tell us how to think, but it sets the stage, fitting experience into a form where it can be shared and explored,” says López. “It’s survival; we see something and try to fit it into our own language.”
López earned both her MFA in visual studies and bachelor’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University. Her undergraduate field still informs how she asks questions about the world: the narrative themes of her work have less to do with place-making in relation to nature, and more to do with the human relationship to place. She is drawn to systems that influence or emerge out of these relationships and how they interlock.
By layering elements of opposing urban and natural visual languages, López considers how the human mind interprets environmental systems. Her work exposes how the anthropoid brain, ceaselessly scientific, is always trying to read, categorize, create binaries, or establish one-to-one links. “It’s practical to look at things in such a dichotomized way,” says the artist, “but that makes it hard to see things as a whole.”
López has noticed the shift in her practice upon returning to Santa Fe, where she has mixed ancestral roots that go back centuries. “It’s powerful to make work in a place that matters to you,” she notes. Though the seeds for Stratigraphy were budding before she moved back to the Southwest, in many ways this project dissects her major life shift.
Several works in Stratigraphy suggest sheet music, with stratified rock functioning as the bars for a score that is not quite linear. When paired together, the opposing city and desert elements of López’s work might express some dissonance, but perhaps a rhythm will ultimately emerge within.
