In 'Pandemonium,' Michelle Lopez Confronts Our Volatile Environment
A commissioned video installation by Michelle Lopez is on view at The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design through December 6.
Expand Image
The best way for visitors to the Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design to experience Pandemonium, a multimedia installation by Associate Professor of Fine Arts Michelle Lopez, is flat on their back.
Combining mechatronics, animation, sound, and VR film, the installation puts the viewer in the middle of swirling newspapers, magazine, clipping, and other ephemera flying overhead in a tornado-like “information maelstrom.”
Curated by Cole Akers, curator & associate director of special projects at The Glass House and Erica F. Battle, curator, BATTLE Projects, in collaboration with Gabrielle Lavin Suzenski, Rochelle F. Levy Director & Chief Curator of The Galleries at Moore, the exhibition is the first of its kind for Lopez, who is best known for her three-dimensional works, like those seen at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 2019.
"The origin of this project was wanting to replicate a tornado and having the viewer be inside the eye of a storm," Lopez says, "in order to talk a little bit more about other forms of tornadoes and clouds, one of them being our technological information cloud."
The exhibition includes a vitrine full of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and other ephemera.
"These are all curated headlines from the past 60 years," Lopez says. "And I think the thing that's so fascinating about looking at these headlines is how relevant they are to what's happening in the global politics now."
In a second gallery, the exhibition also includes skeletal sculptures from Lopez’s House of Cards series, made of lead, steel, and pulled glass, held in place with paracord and heavy rocks.
"What I wanted to create in these sculptures was these impossible moments where they were barely standing," Lopez says.
For Lopez, these precarious works are a response to the formal concerns of Minimalist sculpture but also reflect the changes she has seen in the political life of the United States over the last decade.
"I had always been interested in abstraction, in relationship to the history of sculpture," Lopez says. "But there came a time, being affected by world events, that some of that started to infiltrate into my work. This work was really influenced by the series of events leading up to the 2016 presidential election and feeling that a lot of our infrastructures were collapsing."
Pandemonium is on view through December 6 and can also be experienced at the expansive Fels Planetarium at The Franklin Institute–just across the street–during special free screenings on December 4 and 6.
