Linda Lopez & Mathew McConnell: Live from the Moon
108|Contemporary
August 4-September 24, 2023
On Christmas Eve in 1968, three American astronauts aboard the spacecraft Apollo 8 became the first humans to enter lunar orbit, in a mission that paved the way for the inaugural lunar landing. People on Earth tuned in to their space telecast and listened, perhaps with a mix of trepidation and awe, as the scratchy, static-filled voice of Commander Frank F. Borman II announced, “This is Apollo 8 coming to you live from the moon.”
To this day, the black-and-white footage from the Apollo 8 mission, like subsequent footage of the 1969 moon landing, remains both novel and uncanny. In our era of 24-hour nature cams and Zoom rooms, it is still somewhat challenging to fathom the uninhabitable distance that broadcast technology was able to close in the sixties. This strange feeling of intimacy at a distance—or intimacy born from distance—can be felt in ceramic artists Linda Nguyen Lopez and Mathew McConnell’s two-person show, Live from the Moon, on view at 108|Contemporary through September 24.
Lopez and McConnell, who are married to each other, are described in the show’s press release as interlocutors with “undeniably distinct” practices: Lopez’s sculptures are “fantastical” and dynamic, “laying bare their internal state,” while McConnell’s are “stable”—they “withhold” themselves from the viewer, “guarding their motivations.” This lean, 18-work exhibition, anchored by two installations in 108’s long, sunlit gallery, sets out to wrestle these two distinct practices into a binary, one that, upon closer inspection, dissolves into pleasant resonances and curious echoes.
Take, for instance, the two sculptural installations that dominate the space. Viewers first encounter Lopez’s cobalt blue carpet, from which three large-scale ceramics with sunset-colored mosaic surfaces–titled Truths (lamp and stool), Night Songs, and Floating Ground–seem to emerge like swimmers in a lake. On this work’s horizon, as it were, hangs McConnell’s Didn’t miss a thing, five adjacent wall-mounted panels on which earthenware curios are displayed, without comment, like artifacts of a lost civilization. Initially, the two installations appear diametrically opposed: Lopez’s sculptures are amorphous, fluid, and subtly psychedelic, while McConnell’s are contained within hard-edged rectilinear planes.