Joanna Keane Lopez: Thrice Layered

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.

Joanna Keane Lopez (b. 1991, Albuquerque, NM) is an artist whose work is informed through adobe, paper, clay, wood, textiles and song. She inherited the practice of working with adobe from her family in New Mexico and continues the teachings of enjarradoras and adoberas, women who specialize in the traditional craft of earthen architecture. Keane Lopez’s practice restores the loss of vernacular land-based building methods through the production of sculpture, installation and hands-on educational workshops that navigate loss, fragmentation, land contamination and materiality.

Keane Lopez has exhibited nationally at institutions which include: Lisson Gallery, SITE Santa Fe, The Momentary of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, Sarasota Art Museum and has been supported by the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.