Industrial Arts

In her new exhibition, Industrial Arts, Ana M. Lopez utilizes disparate forms of metalworking to address a variety of relationships within the spectrums of the contemporary body to industry, the individual to one’s beliefs and the places we inhabit. Lopez considers the idea of metal as skin and the relationship of the piece to the corporeality of the maker. She questions what sort of objects does an altered body create? One that takes prescription drugs, wears glasses, and interacts with others through machines, for example.

Through an underlying narrative tendency and self-reference to the materials and processes of metalworking, Lopez creates hybrids; sculptural forms which are physical fictions develop into hardware intended to be brought into the first or second skin of a wearer, providing an illustration of what is happening within the contemporary constructed body. By incorporating/replicating industrial metalwork from the streets of major European cities to be worn on the body as souvenirs, Lopez makes tangible the experience of another place, to address issues of cultural geography and the construction of identities through the process of consumption.