The artist Héctor Zamora’s Lattice Detour is a monument to openness over the enclosure, lightness over heaviness, transience over permanence. The work, the eighth in a series of annual Roof Garden Commissions at The Metropolitan Museum, is organized by Iria Candela, the museum’s curator of Latin American art.
Mr. Zamora’s project is a free-standing curved wall of terra cotta bricks, over 100 feet long and 11 feet high. It appears to have a solid surface and to be perversely positioned to obscure a spectacular view of the park and the Manhattan skyline, nevertheless, the wall surface slowly reveals itself to have unexpected transparency becoming into a sensual and ethereal mesh. The ceramic elements suggest that the work’s role as a partition is equivocal. Its openwork texture allows a full, though filtered—pixelated—view, through it, of the city and park beyond. At the same time, the possibility of interaction between the viewers on either side of the wall is an image fraught with political meaning. With it, the artist wants to reflect what a wall—and specifically the planned U.S.-Mexico border wall—should be and do.
Discover how the artist Héctor Zamora discusses Lattice Detour, his site-specific installation for the Roof Garden at The Met.
