This year’s Met roof garden installation tackles ‘the wall’
Installation view of Héctor Zamora (b. 1974, Mexico), The Roof Garden Commission: Héctor Zamora, Lattice Detour, 2020. Courtesy of the Artist. Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art reopens on August 29, this year’s eighth annual installation on the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden will also be on view. Titled Lattice Detour, the work by Mexican artist Héctor Zamora tackles a prevalent symbol in today’s society–the wall. The 11-foot-tall work deliberately screens views of Central Park and the skyline to evoke the feeling of a barrier to viewers. But the bricks are stacked on their sides, thereby letting in light and air and referencing the latticed celosía walls that are used for shade and ventilation in the Middle East, Africa, Iberia, and Latin America.
Héctor Zamora was born in 1974 in Mexico City. In his adult life, he’s lived in Lisbon, Portugal and São Paulo, but he recently relocated back to Mexico City. He is widely known for his site-specific installations that respond to social issues, as well as the place in which he’s working.
According to a press release from the Met about Lattice Detour:
Through the grid of its openings, the gravity of the massive wall turns into a sensual and ethereal mesh. It is as if the wall itself is beckoning us to look through to the far side. In this way, Zamora invites us to reconsider the panoramic view and the implications of obstruction and permeability within a social space.
Installation view (detail) of Héctor Zamora (b. 1974, Mexico), The Roof Garden Commission: Héctor Zamora, Lattice Detour, 2020. Courtesy of the Artist. Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
Sheena Wagstaff, The Met’s Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art, said, “Constructed of bricks composed of Mexican earth, using local labor and traditional processes, Zamora’s lattice wall is a poetic metaphor writ large, and a critique of the social, political, and economic considerations inherent in its making.”
Lattice Detour will be on view through December 7, 2020.
Last week, the Met revealed two new facade banners by Yoko Ono. Titled DREAM TOGETHER, they were created in response to the global COVID-19 crisis. When the museum reopens on Saturday, in addition to the rooftop installation, there will be two other new exhibits: Making The Met, 1870–2020 and Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle. Exhibits that opened shortly before the closure and have now been extended are: Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara; In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection; and Photography’s Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection.
