CHRISTOPHER Y.LEW: Throughout your work over the years, there are a lot of formalconsiderations of sculpture-gravity, weight, material balance-but at the sametime, the work is always embedded in the world we live in, addressing concernsthat extend beyond art.
MICHELLE LOPEZ:I've always been invested in the history and tradition of sculpture, includingits formal aspects, but I can't help but be affected by the world around us andworld events, particularly 9/11. I was installing a sculpture show near the WorldTrade Center when 9/11 happened, and that had a huge impact on me; I felt Icouldn't make the same work anymore.
Even though I'mstill deeply committed to formalism, it doesn't seem entirely appropriate forthis moment. The work that I've been making now for about a decade has had todo with this sense of global collapse that I'm feeling. I look for signifiersin relationship to that, and then start to see how I can play with thatmateriality to point to this sense of crisis, or amplify it.
CYL: The new work,Pandemonium, is interesting in that it is less of a physical manifestation;you're working with video and with computer-generated imagery. Can you talkabout how that folds into what I still believe is a sculptural practice?
ML: I've alwaystried to grapple with a kind of crisis of sculpture. There's something aboutobjectness that gets complicated in terms of mass, monumentality, and all theproblems surrounding sculpture taking up space, so I'm interested in ways todematerialize it. One of the sculptural tenets that's important for me is theexperience in the round: with sculpture, you actually have to move around it inorder to understand it. With this new project, I've been thinking how thisrelates to conceptualizing spatial relationships in terms of technology and Al.A lot of my work deals with epic acts of violence, and I feel Al is anotherform of violence in relationship to digital and social media, to informationsystems, but it's invisible. When I thought of this information maelstrom, whatultimately came to mind was constructing a collapsing tornado in the builtenvironment, within a 360-degree surround space. But instead of using actualphysical materials to create these tornadoes, the sculptural part of my installationshas become animation —Al and a projection screen.
CYL: I was curiousto get your thoughts on the symbolism and loaded imagery that are in the piece,especially since you've been developing this project for nearly a decade. Howhas your thinking shifted over that time?
ML: At first, Iwas looking at different iconographies related to stereotypical Americana, likethe flag, and thinking about this sense of a broken national identity,questioning the ways that flags are used in relationship to power and a sort ofblind patriotism. My work has also explored failure in relationship totechnology, say, or to the American dream. But then I started expanding towardsthese epic acts of violence, such as environmental hurricanes, tornadoes as aresult of the climate crisis, global warfare-all contributing to this existingsense that our known infrastructures are failing and are in collapse.
Because theoriginal format was sited within a planetarium, I wanted to create my ownconstellations out of culture.
I was interestedin creating a concert within a stadium, where the cell phone lights ofconcertgoers appear as stars in the overarching sky. I also wanted to capturethe tension that exists between the mania of a crowd and its sense of unitythrough collective gathering. That was largely influenced by the George Floyduprisings: I was really impacted by how great it felt to be with crowdschanting, particularly after having been locked up so muchduring the pandemic. I wanted to create a moment of what's happening in theworld: as both dividing us and bringing us together at once.
CYL: I wasthinking about the installation, how all-encompassing and epic it is. What doesit mean to be working on something that is taking on these themes at such largescale, and over such a relatively long span of time? More is more...
ML: It's such adifferent approach for me, because I'm very minimal, and l've definitelywondered if this has been the right approach. When I workshopped Pandemoniumat Fabric Workshop [in 2024], it all came together; it just felt more dynamicand more truthful to what was happening now. At the same time, I've always beeninterested in this idea of beauty in relationship to the grotesque throughviolence. I feel that what's happening in the work is only possible because ofall these layers.
CYL: Yeah, I thinksome of your past works can read as twisted or mangled, but also very seductiveat the same time. Your Correctional Lighting piece has such an elegant balanceto it, but also a sense of menace.
ML: Yes, I've beenusing a lot more elements to activate the space: the rotary motor, the sound ofthe sodium bulb of highway lamps. But again, I’m really thinking about themateriality of everything. The lamp was cast in iron because I wanted it tofeel like the weight of a plumb bob [level] hanging down, and then the cinderblock has this kind of translucency, because I wanted it to feel like ice thatcould met, or glass that could break, but also be able to cast a shadow ontothe wall, giving it a menacing quality.
SO the searchlightis following the figure in a circular chase.
CYL: It'srecognizable forms, but transformed into different materials. I think thecombination of movement, light, and sound certainly brings it beyond the usualexpectations of sculpture.
ML: Sound has beensomething that's been consistent for me as a spatial element— again, to achievethis kind of menacing quality. There's a consistency of "pounding" inmy work, whether it's the Liberty Bell clanging or a flag flapping. I did apiece with a bird continuously hitting a glass window with its body, but it wasjust like, you know-
CYL: The sound ofits own making.
ML: Yeah, that's anice observation.
CYL: Does havingyour work shown in the context of a museum of American art carry any particularresonance for you, especially as a diasporic artist thinking about the volatilemoment we're in, both in the US and in a more global sense?
ML: I think mywork has always taken a positionality in relationship to being FilipinoAmerican-the Philippines is essentially this colonized territory of the UnitedStates. I've always been interested in that love-hate dynamic, i.e., how thePhilippines is obsessed with American culture, as so many countries have been.
My work has alwaysapproached iconography in relationship to a kind of cynicism surrounding theAmerican Dream and the shock of its collapse, because I definitely grew up asan American with the sense that my family was a part of that dream, and so thework is informed by those concerns. I feel there's a different kind of urgencynow for artists, in the way they are approaching this idea of American identityin their work.
CYL: Definitely,but not necessarily dissimilar to other moments in the past.
ML: True. I wasthinking about abstraction- which you know I'm drawn to in my formal work-andhow that came out of a time of warfare and crisis. I just read Ninth StreetWomen (2018), this biography about women abstract painters in New York fromthe 1940s through the 1960s-the "triumph" of American painting. Itwas a very different sense of identity, a different time and crisis, but westill use a lot of the same vocabulary and respond in the same way, becausethese cycles continue. That said, I do feel now, more than ever, America isexperiencing a very different kind of collapse, and there's not as much a senseof hope, of building back up. That may turn out to be good; it may be themoment when things have to regenerate in a positive way.
CYL: Moments ofcrisis open up new possibilities, and I think art, in general, allows us todream of those possibilities.
ML: I think thiswork for me came out of crisis: a crisis of American consumerism as an artistand maker. I don't want to shoot myself in the foot as a sculptor, but I'vebeen wanting to find other ways to think about three-dimensionality that aren'tso bound by the physicality of monumental stuff.
CYL: And whatyou're depicting within the tornado is so much stuff-literal materials, whichwe see in the aftermath of devastation. There are so many things scatteredabout and in the air.
ML: Yes, thisproject also came from another material I was thinking about: the internet andthe amount of information and storage we have, more stuff. What could that looklike in a work of art? How could I describe that outsize aspect of our worldright now?
CYL: Not justdescribe, but also, what does it feel like?
ML: What does itfeel like, and also what would it feel like not to have it? There's this momentat the end of the film where the debris all gets sucked away and disappearsinto blackness. I think a part of it is a sense of: Could there possibly beliberation from this world of stuff and from whatever systems we're all caughtup in?
CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW is founder of C/O: Curatorial Office and a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.