Tying Up the Wolves

An Interview with artist Angela Lopez by Amanda Dee

In your artist statement, you compare your forms and subjects to natural science specimens “frozen in a moment of metamorphosis.” Could you elaborate on that?

Angela Lopez: I’m attracted to medical illustration, but also the history of medicine and how we’ve interpreted health and the connection of psychological states to physical health. I like that medical illustration is a study of a part of the body. My interest in it comes from my family’s history with health. I always think of bodies and health in relationship to their fragility but also their ability to heal. Most of my drawings are not from life and there’s a lot of imagined scenarios in them, but they’re transitional states – decay, a body dying and growing. I feel like it’s also my thought pattern.

Your video piece Tie Them Up, currently on display at 6018North as part of the Windows to the World exhibition, is based on a Cherokee story. In it, a grandfather tells his grandson about two wolves fighting inside him. One good, the other bad. The grandson asks, “Which wolf will win the fight?” And the answer is “the one you feed.” Tell me more about how the story inspired the piece.  

I’m not Native American so it’s not a personal connection to the story, but I came across it while reading and exploring why I am interested in wolves. Wolves just show up over and over in my work. Later in my life, I discovered that my last name Lopez means wolf. The story and the piece are also about the larger life cycle. 

The way the curators and I talked about it was that this video presents a choice: What are you going to do with your wolves? We all have these two wolves inside of us. Which wolf will you feed? I’m proposing tying them up and starving them, which is pretty violent but also trying to stop that tension while acknowledging that you need both wolves to live. This act can be interpreted as a rejection of the idea of good vs evil. If only one wolf is fed, the starved wolf will eat the one you fed. It can also be interpreted as an attempt to have further control over the wolves by trying to eliminate them both.

You work across an impressive range of mediums. Are there certain themes or ideas that naturally lead you to think “Oh this must be an animation” or “This is a sculpture”?

If I feel like “You need to see this move,” then I’ll animate it. I chose to animate the wolves. The wolves aren’t necessarily about one act; it’s about seeing that tension.

Before I started doing animation, I made a few works that are essentially like animation but they’re a repetition of the same image. I started thinking, “When I repeat something emphasizing one moment, or one action, what does that mean?” To repeat creates time. For my piece Dip Hands In, it creates time but in a different way – it’s spatial time. Ideally, it causes more of a pause to really look at every second. 

A lot of your work features imagery that might seem macabre: severed limbs, coloring of bruises and sometimes blood. But it also is very hopeful, almost optimistic. I feel like that makes your piece a perfect fit for “Windows to the World”, because you have to be present in this moment but look out the window and think “Okay, but what could be possible?” What do you see when you look out that window?

We’re seeing inequities highlighted right now and there are clear examples of them, not just racially but economically. So many systems are failing. We can’t just point to one. A lot needs to be reimagined. Some things are simple changes, and that’s where there is some hope. Individuals making changes, individuals making choices. And I think that’s where the wolves come in. 

Is there something that you want the piece to elicit in someone who’s seeing it?

To really look at themselves. Make reflective and thoughtful choices. Acknowledge that maybe you have instincts within yourself that aren’t necessarily going to lead you in the right direction. 

Amanda Dee is a multimedia storyteller fixed on Midwestern identities and relationships to place. She is a writer at Sixty Inches from Center and the former editor-in-chief of Dayton City Paper. For more info, visit amandadee.work. This interview was created as a part of the 6018North Writer’s Workshop.