2005-08 The Year We Made Contact LAxART/YBCA

"LA><ART is pleased to present The Year We Made Contact, an ongoing series of sculptures by Michelle Lopez that engages interests in popular culture, material decay, and formal integration. An elegant amalgam of synthetic processes and organic growth, the works reflect the cross-evolution of natural and fictitious worlds. The installation occupies a space of temporal ambiguity, drawing from the vermicular of science fiction, wherein the projected future is the preset and the present functions as a hollowed ruin. Through this deployment of these sci-fi narrative, the objects comprising Lopez's exhibition stand as empty relics suspended in a pop-cultural memory, renegotiating notions of iconicity while collapsing onto a history of natural wonder.

For The Year We Made Contact Lopez undertakes a number of sculptural strategies that examine the constructed phenomenon of the Star Wars legacy. The Death Star, serving as the ultimate weapon within this epic saga here, reveals its abject interiority and functions as a deconstructed metaphor, its structural fragments evoking the temporal contingency of cultural invention against the incomprehensible scope of natural forces. Alongside this, an additional work interweaves tree branches, prosthetic limb, and studio production equipment to suggest the aftermath of disaster, providing no indication of human presence as a totalized entity and emptying a space for the protection of fantasy. Lopez's larger practice deconstructs the boundaries between the grandiose and the pathetic, allowing each to collapse and devolve into haunting anthropomorphic abstractions.In her sculpture entitled Crux, for example, a tree metamorphoses into unstable, lifeless dead weight held by metal supports, situating itself in an ambiguous space that is neither organic nor machine like, growing nor decaying, human or inhuman."

-LA><X presents a new series of sculptures by Michelle Lopez, May 10 to June 21, 2008, excerpts from the press release.