Lopez began working with her family's photographs as a way
of reconstructing memories and exploring feelings of loss and change. She
created works dedicated to her father, mother, and her eldest brother who was
killed in Vietnam. She remarked that many of the memories of her oldest brother
were in part constructed from his presence in family photographs. Working with
snapshots from family vacations Lopez began to stitch together new images of
her family that would exist in an artificial space of her own creation outside
of a specific moment in time.
"By extracting people from their
original context and then placing them into fabricated landscapes, I hope to
retell a story of their being, one which allows the images to acquire a life of
their own. While the pieces from photographs verify an actual lived experience,
the landscape stands as my metaphor for life, demarcating its quality, where
the horizon suggests an endless time." - Martina lopez.
The figures in Lopez's images vary in scale and placement
within each scene and are rendered in monochromatic tones so they seem to have
no direct connection to the fabricated landscapes they occupy. The surreal
landscapes, composed of disjointed topographies that are appropriated from
other sources and from photographs made specifically for the piece, become a
stage setting in which the placement of each character is carefully
choreographed.
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