Nancy Lupo “Max Payday” at Morán Morán, Mexico City

Nancy Lupo “Max Payday” at Morán Morán, Mexico City, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Morán Morán Gallery. Photo: Gerardo Lando

The exhibition features a video and a new series of sculptures created by Lupo during her recent artist-in-residence at Casa Wabi on the Oaxacan coast. In addition to these new works, she presents Banquet, a large-scale textile piece (2018–23), composed of tiny pellets and bits of materials glued to fabric sewn into covers for the four different cars she has owned and driven throughout her life. This grouping of sculptural works sits in the space amidst subtle architectural interventions. Lupo describes the installation as “scripted” by an extended first-person text that is dispersed throughout the gallery.

The exhibition’s title, “Max Payday,” is a found piece of language describing the current wave of catalytic converter thefts occurring around the world which happened to Lupo at the beginning of the year. In this context, she makes use of several converter shells that were sourced in Mexico City. These shells are the valueless remnant after the precious metals’ honeycomb structure has been smelted and transformed into a new economy. The “cats” (as mechanics in the US often call them) enter into a dialogue with new iterations of Lupo’s tellers series, based on forms derived from temporary tent structures, while also referencing the origami fortune-telling game for children and the job title of a bank worker who handles daily financial transactions. The grid composition of these small sculptures, made from toilet paper and glue, collapses and distorts under their own accumulated weight, creating a new kind of game with endless associations.

One of Lupo’s main concerns in “Max Payday” are cyclical situations, of weather, of emotional scenarios and the transmutation of value. The exhibition references the bioluminescent disturbance in bodies of water and the golden layer that appeared to her in the landscape as mangoes ripened and rotted while she worked en plein air. Lupo often pays attention to these kinds of weather-related circumstances. From her perspective, her engagement is prompted not by one specific type of occurrence but rather by a subtle, beguiling electricity that is often combined with a serendipitous confluence of visual and contextual events. It is not exactly “the spiritual” that she is concerned with, but rather the ways in which various excesses, often related to capitalism, desperately work to fill up voids of unknowability.