CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW: Throughout your work over the years, there are a lot of formal considerations of sculpture-gravity, weight, material balance-but at the same time, the work is always embedded in the world we live in, addressing concerns that extend beyond art.
MICHELLE LOPEZ: I've always been invested in the history and tradition of sculpture, including its formal aspects, but I can't help but be affected by the world around us and world 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 I couldn't make the same work anymore.
Even though I'm still deeply committed to formalism, it doesn't seem entirely appropriate for this moment. The work that I've been making now for about a decade has had to do with this sense of global collapse that I'm feeling. I look for signifiers in relationship to that, and then start to see how I can play with that materiality 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 talk about how that folds into what I still believe is a sculptural practice?
ML: I've always tried to grapple with a kind of crisis of sculpture. There's something about objectness that gets complicated in terms of mass, monumentality, and all the problems surrounding sculpture taking up space, so I'm interested in ways to dematerialize it. One of the sculptural tenets that's important for me is the experience in the round: with sculpture, you actually have to move around it in order to understand it. With this new project, I've been thinking how this relates 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 another form of violence in relationship to digital and social media, to information systems, but it's invisible. When I thought of this information maelstrom, what ultimately came to mind was constructing a collapsing tornado in the built environment, within a 360-degree surround space. But instead of using actual physical materials to create these tornadoes, the sculptural part of my installation has become animation — Al and a projection screen.
CYL: I was curious to 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. How has your thinking shifted over that time?
ML: At first, I was looking at different iconographies related to stereotypical Americana, like the 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 of blind patriotism. My work has also explored failure in relationship to technology, say, or to the American dream. But then I started expanding towards these epic acts of violence, such as environmental hurricanes, tornadoes as a result of the climate crisis, global warfare-all contributing to this existing sense that our known infrastructures are failing and are in collapse.
Because the original format was sited within a planetarium, I wanted to create my own constellations out of culture.
I was interested in creating a concert within a stadium, where the cell phone lights of concertgoers appear as stars in the overarching sky. I also wanted to capture the tension that exists between the mania of a crowd and its sense of unity through collective gathering. That was largely influenced by the George Floyd uprisings: I was really impacted by how great it felt to be with crowds chanting, particularly after having been locked up so much during the pandemic. I wanted to create a moment of what's happening in the world: as both dividing us and bringing us together at once.
CYL: I was thinking about the installation, how all-encompassing and epic it is. What does it mean to be working on something that is taking on these themes at such large scale, and over such a relatively long span of time? More is more...
ML: It's such a different approach for me, because I'm very minimal, and l've definitely wondered if this has been the right approach. When I workshopped Pandemonium at Fabric Workshop [in 2024], it all came together; it just felt more dynamic and more truthful to what was happening now. At the same time, I've always been interested in this idea of beauty in relationship to the grotesque through violence. I feel that what's happening in the work is only possible because of all these layers.
CYL: Yeah, I think some of your past works can read as twisted or mangled, but also very seductive at the same time. Your Correctional Lighting piece has such an elegant balance to it, but also a sense of menace.
ML: Yes, I've been using a lot more elements to activate the space: the rotary motor, the sound of the sodium bulb of highway lamps. But again, I’m really thinking about the materiality of everything. The lamp was cast in iron because I wanted it to feel 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 that could met, or glass that could break, but also be able to cast a shadow onto the wall, giving it a menacing quality. So the searchlight is following the figure in a circular chase.
CYL: It's recognizable forms, but transformed into different materials. I think the combination of movement, light, and sound certainly brings it beyond the usual expectations of sculpture.
ML: Sound has been something that's been consistent for me as a spatial element— again, to achieve this kind of menacing quality. There's a consistency of "pounding" in my work, whether it's the Liberty Bell clanging or a flag flapping. I did a piece with a bird continuously hitting a glass window with its body, but it was just like, you know-
CYL: The sound of its own making.
ML: Yeah, that's a nice observation.
CYL: Does having your work shown in the context of a museum of American art carry any particular resonance for you, especially as a diasporic artist thinking about the volatile moment we're in, both in the US and in a more global sense?
ML: I think my work has always taken a positionality in relationship to being Filipino American-- the Philippines is essentially this colonized territory of the United States. I've always been interested in that love-hate dynamic, i.e., how the Philippines is obsessed with American culture, as so many countries have been.
My work has always approached iconography in relationship to a kind of cynicism surrounding the American Dream and the shock of its collapse, because I definitely grew up as an American with the sense that my family was a part of that dream, and so the work is informed by those concerns. I feel there's a different kind of urgency now for artists, in the way they are approaching this idea of American identity in their work.
CYL: Definitely, but not necessarily dissimilar to other moments in the past.
ML: True. I was thinking about abstraction- which you know I'm drawn to in my formal work- and how 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 from the 1940s through the 1960s-the "triumph" of American painting. It was a very different sense of identity, a different time and crisis, but we still use a lot of the same vocabulary and respond in the same way, because these cycles continue. That said, I do feel now, more than ever, America is experiencing a very different kind of collapse, and there's not as much a sense of hope, of building back up. That may turn out to be good; it may be the moment when things have to regenerate in a positive way.
CYL: Moments of crisis open up new possibilities, and I think art, in general, allows us to dream of those possibilities.
ML: I think this work for me came out of crisis: a crisis of American consumerism as an artist and maker. I don't want to shoot myself in the foot as a sculptor, but I've been wanting to find other ways to think about three-dimensionality that aren't so bound by the physicality of monumental stuff.
CYL: And what you're depicting within the tornado is so much stuff-literal materials, which we see in the aftermath of devastation. There are so many things scattered about and in the air.
ML: Yes, this project also came from another material I was thinking about: the internet and the amount of information and storage we have, more stuff. What could that look like in a work of art? How could I describe that outsize aspect of our world right now?
CYL: Not just describe, but also, what does it feel like?
ML: What does it feel like, and also what would it feel like not to have it? There's this moment at the end of the film where the debris all gets sucked away and disappears into blackness. I think a part of it is a sense of: Could there possibly be liberation from this world of stuff and from whatever systems we're all caught up in?
CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW is founder of C/O: Curatorial Office and a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.