LACMA

century who grappled with the dizzying rise of urbanization and mass culture, López renders the chaotic experience rather than the rational conception of the built environment. López's layering of imagery "feels" right, just close enough to the real thing to avoid becoming purely metaphorical, or even surreal, and yet abstracted and conceptual enough to require the viewer's intellectual engagement in order to make some sense of its mapping. In the end, what keeps her art from becoming dystopic or nihilistic is the delicate balance between its nightmarish vision and López's meticulous and masterful artistry. As she explains, the work relies on techniques that are closely linked to the artist's hand and to pretechnological modes of production. The work conjures up the "overwhelming landscape" of modernity, but it also remains at its core the labor of an individual artist, the product of a thoughtful accretion of imagery, and a gallery-based experience. In this respect, López's process for her installations provides a significant self-reflexive component. Her use of the ceiling, ducts, corners, hallways, door frames, and pillars effectively intrudes into the infrastructure of the gallery space (and gallery system), thereby producing both allegory and literal manifestation of the parasitic, viral, or weedlike process depicted by the artwork. In this regard, she blurs the boundary between inside and outside, gallery and society, cognition and affect. —CHON A. NORIEGA At first glance, Nicola López's drawings, prints, and installations conjure up what one critic calls an "orgiastic chaos" in which the built environment has been overrun by its own technological, architectural, and economic development, not to mention the intertwined forces of terrorism and militarism. There is an almost organic quality to these works, as if the dystopia they envision emerges not by design or intent but as something on the order of what she has called a "slimy postindustrial moss" that threatens to engulf the gallery space itself. Indeed, her installations appear to explode outward across the walls, but they also encroach onto the floor and ceiling spaces, as if trying to bring the viewer into the experiential frame of their world- view. In this respect, López's work is less about the relationship between nature and technology, as most critics argue, since there are almost no signs of nature in these works. Instead, it signals the ways in which technology has become a kudzu introduced into the ecosystem of human society. But López is after something much more nuanced and complicated than a simple "back-to-nature" message. This is most noticeable by the fact that her visual vocab- ulary is almost entirely defined by references to the basic infrastructures for modern society that are always controlled or regulated by the state: communications, trans- portation, energy utilities, law enforcement, national defense, and, implicitly, the currency system. These infrastructures acquire a life of their own, as it were, one whose scale and complexity exceed not only administrative control but human understanding. Rather than attempt what Fredric Jameson calls a "cognitive map" of this condi- tion, López goes in two other directions. First, she draws upon her background in anthropology in order to undertake an archaeological excavation of these basic infrastructures. At a formal level, her use of intaglio and relief techniques contribute to the sense of peeling back the phantoms that have been hidden, buried, or mystified by both popular and official culture. Even so, what we end up seeing is not an underlying structure—a physical architecture, a conceptual framework, or rational plan—that offers possibilities for navigation (that is, something that can be mapped toward some utilitarian end), but rather the dysfunctional underpinnings that confound our sense of control and understanding. Second, and related to this exca- vation, López produces what amounts to an affective map that registers our subjective experience of modernity. In this regard, much like artists at the turn of the last 168 NICOLA LÓPEZ

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