The first thing Matthew L\u00f3pez-Jensen \u201908 MFA needs is a pair of shoes. Not just any shoes, but shoes for climbing fences, tromping in and around marshes, and walking 20 miles. He laces up his latest pair of New Balance sneakers, grabs his camera, notebook, and a backpack and sets out.<\/p>\n
That is how, at the beginning of the pandemic, you\u2019d find L\u00f3pez-Jensen. He had been asked by Mary Miss, the director of City as Living Laboratory \u2014 a nonprofit that works with artists, scientists, and residents of urban communities to find solutions to environmental issues \u2014 to create a virtual walk along Tibbetts Brook. So he followed the brook from the Bronx to Yonkers, mapping out a path that could serve as an online respite for people stuck indoors.<\/p>\n
\u201cI ended up in a field of marsh marigolds, and it\u2019s swampy, and there are no planes overhead because it\u2019s in the middle of Covid, so it\u2019s super quiet,\u201d he says. \u201cA great blue heron emerges out of the grass up ahead, and it flies off, and I\u2019m sitting there by this little muddy trickle of a stream in the middle of what feels like nowhere, but it\u2019s the middle of New York City. I have versions of that experience in almost every landscape. It\u2019s quiet. I\u2019m alone, and nature\u2019s being nature, and it\u2019s wonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Guggenheim Fellow, L\u00f3pez-Jensen is an \u201cinterdisciplinary lens-based artist\u201d whose pieces are part of the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the Center for Fine Art Photography. His projects have received National Endowment of the Arts funding.<\/p>\n
He takes photographs and gathers into artful bundles the flora he finds along Brooklyn\u2019s Flatbush Avenue or the banks of a winding river \u2014 common mullein, ragweed, couch grass, sycamore, or seaweed, entwined with treasures he\u2019s discovered. One such treasure, a porcelain cane topper in the form of dice from the 1920s is \u201csort of symbolic for walking and chance,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m trying to build a subtle portrait of a place with objects and plants.\u201d<\/p>\n