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Nicola López: Haunted

July 6, 2020 – June 28, 2021

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Haunted, by artist Nicola López, a large, two-panel installation mounted on the wall of the Albuquerque Museum lobby. Each panel depicts one half of a desert landscape. Multiple small projectors are mounted to the front of the installation, projecting videos onto the front of the landscape.

Nicola López, Haunted, 2020, monotype on mylar, projectors with steel mounts, video, 131 x 597 x 5 in., photo by Kim Richardson

Nicola López in conversation with former Albuquerque Museum curator Josie Lopez, August 18, 2020

A detail of the right panel of Haunted, by artist Nicola López, an installation mounted on the wall of the Albuquerque Museum lobby. This panel depicts one half of a desert landscape. Multiple small projectors are mounted to the front of the panel, projecting videos onto the landscape.

Haunted (detail), photo by Kim Richardson

A detail of the left panel of Haunted, by artist Nicola López, an installation mounted on the wall of the Albuquerque Museum lobby. This panel depicts one half of a desert landscape. Multiple small projectors are mounted to the front of the panel, projecting videos onto the landscape.

Haunted (detail), photo by Kim Richardson

A close-up detail of the right panel of Haunted, by artist Nicola López, an installation mounted on the wall of the Albuquerque Museum lobby. This panel depicts one half of a desert landscape, with rocks, distant mountains, and plants. Multiple small projectors are mounted to the front of the panel, projecting videos onto the landscape.

Haunted (detail), photo by Kim Richardson

Albuquerque Museum’s Visiting Artist program is generously funded by the Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation.

Nicola López’s installation, Haunted, brought an alternative experience of New Mexico’s natural landscape into Albuquerque Museum’s lobby as part of the annual Visiting Artist program. While the layers of color and representations of texture echo the beauty and remoteness of many places in the state, Haunted, was a site-responsive work that reveals the far-reaching impacts humans have had on landscapes that are now and forever altered.

According to Lopez, “Alongside the forces of geology and time, human actions have touched every part of the earth’s surface and the reality of all things that inhabit it. Nature as a site untouched by humanity is a ghost that haunts us just as the future is already haunted by the trickle-down and side effects of past, present, and future technologies and the specters of the atrocities we inflict on our environment in the name of progress.”

Collaged, printed and hand-drawn elements were installed directly on the wall to create a hybrid landscape in which geological and human-built features intertwined. This static landscape was inhabited by moving images projected directly over the wall-mounted collage. Since sunlight poured into the lobby area through large windows adjacent to the exhibition space, the projection was visible to varying degrees as light conditions shift throughout the day and seasons. Sometimes the projection was barely visible—and entirely ghostlike—while at other times it was stronger, the way that phantoms can seem most palpable in spaces of darkness. The projected imagery included a mix of original documentary and constructed video footage. It engaged ideas of the sublime, the surreal and the all-too-real as it explores how our landscape is permanently haunted by human impact.

A black-and-white headshot of artist Nicola López. She has light-colored skin and dark hair, worn up. She wears a white T-shirt and rings and stands against a white background with her hand on her chest.

Photo by Clayton Porter

About the Artist

Nicola López’s (born 1975 Santa Fe, New Mexico; lives Albuquerque, New Mexico) work in drawing, printmaking, site-specific installation, sculpture and video examines and reconfigures our contemporary landscape, pointing to deep connections and rifts between our human-constructed world and systems and cycles of nature. She engages architecture and urban structure as ever-accumulating evidence of human aspirations and failures, often contrasting and intertwining them with geological and organic formations. Her work draws on anthropology, architecture, urban planning and historical and fictional explorations of utopia/dystopia. It also leans heavily into material process, intentionally bringing joy, improvisation, and care into the work as it reflects on human patterns of extraction and construction.

Nicola López's Website