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In the series ROPE PROP REVERSAL, Lopez purges density and mass from Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards) by retracing its shape in a line drawing assembled with industrial rigging rope. In THREE ROPE PROP, large-scale, open-ended steel ropes form tenuous squares that appear to lean on one another. On closer examination, the forms hover and rise independently, held upright through a careful balance of tension and counterweight. Lopez contradicts the rope’s materiality and weight by restructuring its core and torching the steel to make impossible movements and bends. Additional works such as HEMP DREAM andSAFETY DREAM outwardly convey precarity and demise in braids of flocked steel—an argument against the resolute immutability of monuments. Lopez’s interest in rope is rooted in building a morphology of defiance (what she calls“hyper-rope”) through the process of flocking, in which nylon fibers are electro-statically fused onto the medium’s substrate. In its tactility of reinforcement and contradiction, the velvet-like “hyper-rope” breaks from its attendant associations of limpness and restraint to manifest an unfettered support for its own tenuous formation.