In Smoke Clouds, I explored themes of disappearance through the shifting image within the material of silver nitrate (mirroring solution) poured onto large-scale architectural glass. My mirrored smoke clouds suspend an explosion—the residue of violence after a moment of destruction. This process, like all my work, originated from the drawing gesture of my body and also requires blind intuition, as I move the clear liquid of silver nitrate gesturally with an air pressure wand onto the large glass to form a cloud. —Michelle Lopez

TWO LEANING SHEETS of hazily mirrored glass, Smoke Cloud VIII, open the exhibition Michelle Lopez: Shadow of a Doubt, setting the stage for an unfolding of Michelle Lopez’s practice over the past twenty years. She is best known for her large-scale sculptures of abstracted industrial materials—aluminum poles, architectural glass, steel sheets, metal scaffolding, and galvanized cable—which are crumpled, precariously balanced, and generally made vulnerable in surprising ways. In these works, Lopez has developed a visual lexicon forged from the history of minimalist sculpture that she has made anew through her own physical gestures—a bend, a lean, a pour—that echo the fragility and failures of systemic infrastructures that are meant to support us. For Lopez, these gestures—her body’s own interaction with materials, be it sheetmetal or even the invisible silver nitrate of Smoke Cloud—are acts of drawing, which she holds at the center of her practice.

‍Shadow of a Doubt presents three main bodies of work—BlueAngels (2011–12), Rope Prop Reversal (2019–25), and GhostTresses (2008/2023)—alongside works on paper and a new wall drawing, all showcasing her formal drawing practice for the first time. In doing so, the exhibition explores how Lopez engages with, in her words, “themes of disappearance through the shifting image,” where abstraction communicates not through an image but through materials: not a broken airplane wing but bent metal painted in airline hues as in one example. For Lopez, making artwork is an act of evacuating the image and leaving the shadow, standing squarely in, and not beyond, doubt.

In the following conversation, Lopez weighs in on the origins of themultiple series on view, the material and political shifts in her workafter 9/11, and why we should all study art history.

—Dina Deitsch, Director + Chief Curator, TUAG

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Full conversation between Dina Deitsch and Michelle Lopez available here.

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