Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Jacobs and Copley Buildings | 1001 Kettner Blvd.
CA-92101 San Diego

plan route show map
mcasd.org 619 234 1001 info@mcasd.org

artist / participant

Nancy Lupo 

press release

venue:
MCASD - Downtown
Jacobs Building
1100 & 1001 Kettner Boulevard
San Diego, CA 92101

Nancy Lupo. Scripts for the pageant
21.11.2019 - 15.03.2020

Opening:
Thursday, November 21, 2019
5 - 8 PM

For her first solo museum exhibition, Los Angeles-based artist Nancy Lupo stages a conversation between the architecture of MCASD Downtown’s Farrell Gallery and a new sculpture, Open Mouth.

Composed of a circular arrangement of 16 cast aluminum benches, Open Mouth invites viewers to sit and engage the sculpture with their bodies. The benches approximate, in 3/4-scale, versions of benches Lupo noticed at Termini train station in Rome. While the aesthetics of most public furnishings are meant to recede behind their functionality, the odd end pieces of the Termini bench stand out for their peculiarly suggestive form, appearing alternately as a tombstone or as an enlarged tooth. If imagined from above, Lupo’s Open Mouth follows a double catenary curve to trace the diagram of an open mouth, where the curious end pieces stand in as teeth in an adult human jaw.

The title for the exhibition, Scripts for the Pageant, is shared with a poem by James Merrill. Less of a specific reference, Lupo uses language as another kind of found object, to be re-staged and re-contextualized. Alongside the installation of benches, the exhibition includes a carefully chosen selection from a series of ongoing works in photography, video, writing, and sculpture that form part of what she considers to be an archive or alphabet. Each of these pieces is brought together to construct an internal logic within the exhibition, based around rules or systems that are not always visible.

Lupo’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018, 2013); Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016); Atlanta Contemporary (2016); MoMA PS1, New York (2014); and Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2013), among others. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Grant (2015), Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant (2013), and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Fountainhead Fellowship (2012). Furthermore, she had solo presentations such as The Square at Noon, Visual Arts Center University of Texas, Austin

 (2019); Parent and Parroting, The Swiss Institute, New York (2016); or A Desire to Learn Esperanto: Having a Thing to do with Esperanto, Ballantine Beer, both or neither, (curated by Olivian Cha), Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles (2010).