Malena Lopez-Maggi

More than anything else, Malena Lopez-Maggi is curious. She’s curious about the sky above us, the water we drink and the air we breathe. She’s curious about cycles of nature, and their relation to the manmade world. “There’s this whole world that exists at scales that we can’t perceive,” she says. “It’s like parallel universes, all stacked on top of each other.”

She loves spending time in the desert, where it feels like there’s nothing but sky. On a recent trip, she was surprised to see how colorless—almost bleached—the cloud cover appeared. Those observations gave way to the installation she created for Limited Edition: laser-cut shapes inspired by the tiny particles that linger in our air.

Her integration of the synthetic with the natural comments mischievously on the serious impact that we humans have on our surroundings. Her Richmond, CA studio is filled with plastics, putties and foils that are in various stages of transformation into fantastic geological decoys.

Recreating nature’s cadences is no small feat, and she embraces the contradiction of using man-made materials to replicate natural phenomena. “I wanted to capture these clouds… obviously you can never really translate all those nuances.” But that’s not going to stop her from trying.