Project Room: Joanna Keane Lopez

Thrice Layered is the inaugural de Saisset Project Room exhibition, by Stanford based artist, Joanna Keane Lopez. In keeping with de Saisset’s Museum in Progress theme - embedded throughout the museum - the Project Room functions as an extension of Keane Lopez’s studio and as a result, reflects aspects of the artist’s process in flux.

Thrice Layered traces, blurs and layers the historical and contemporary colonial power of the U.S. nuclear industry's impact upon land in the Southwestern United States. These ideas are examined in relation to archival documents—aerial perspective maps, diagrams, architectural plans and eye witness drawings—specific to the region that identify Indigenous territories, Spanish and Mexican land grants, US acquisition and assimilation, and nuclear industrial cartographies and fallout locations from the world's first nuclear bomb, the Trinity Test, in south central New Mexico. Utilizing adobe and ink jet printing, Keane Lopez transforms these materials into layered collages of abstracted photography that gesture toward the violent nuclear narratives that lie unassumingly within the contemporary American built landscape.

The Project Room series is organized by Ennis, Baines, and Sicat

Project Room Initiative

Supporting artists in Silicon Valley, The Project Room highlights the work of marginalized artists—women, non-binary identifying, BIPOC artists and those discriminated against due to their age—whose work privileges experimental practices that are formally and conceptually rich. Proximate to the permanent ongoing exhibition, The Project Room provides artists opportunities to critically dialogue with California Stories.