Michelle Lopez

Over three decades, Michelle Lopez has forged new directions in sculpture by questioning its assumed tenets of stability, strength, and permanence, while exposing the vulnerabilities inherent in its materials and forms. Her laborious process yields objects of unexpected material combinations that amplify histories and encapsulate the instability of the moment. In FOLDING BOY AND BLUE, the artist’s second solo exhibition with Commonwealth and Council, sheets of aluminum and steel are bent and laboriously folded into fallen angels—evoking airplane wings and logos, Minimalist sculpture, infrastructural collapse, and the ongoing aftermath of 9/11—while a crashed car door is enveloped in skin-colored nylon flocking. Collisions of history, process, and physicality unfold: between past works and present conditions, between the precipice of failure and possibility of recuperation.

The exhibition’s title nods to previous chapters in the artist’s practice. BOY, first exhibited in 1999, featured a full-scale 1971 Honda-600 sheathed in flesh-toned leather. This enveloping act both distilled and diffused the artist’s interrogation of identity and objectification, the readymade suffused with both the industrial refuse of postwar capitalism and the haptic, feminist, and self-reflexive concerns of postminimalism. Named after the U.S. Navy’s flying squadron known for its aerobatic displays,¹ BLUE ANGELS comprises aluminum sheets that Lopez folds and props against the wall, crumpled wings funneling larger totalizing forces—the long legacy of 9/11, mounting global upheavals, and the collapse of American and global power infrastructures—into precarious forms explicitly through her body. A Minimalist rejoinder also ensues: Lopez seeks to pressure the assumed authority, impervious and unshakable, of the postwar movement with each crease, dent, and break.

Five works expand upon the formal logic of Lopez’s BLUE ANGELS. FOLDED BLUE ANGEL (AMERICAN) and FOLDED BLUE ANGEL (UNITED) are mirrored aluminum angels, pinned to the wall and folded over, resulting in forms that shimmer and slump. They bear hallmarks of the airplane industry: rivets used as joinery, insides painted in the signature colors of airline logos. At the center of the main gallery is FOLDED PAPER ANGEL (RED), a freestanding, once ten-foot tall piece of steel painted in matte red is folded twice over to confront viewers at a five-foot human scale. Delicacy and fragility arise in monumentality’s stead, the work evoking the folds of a paper airplane more than its technological referent. In a separate room, FOLDED BLUE ANGEL (KOREAN) slumps as it stands sentinel: solitary, powder-coated in blue, and evincing the use of a vise to achieve its textured form.

If one of Minimalism’s aims is to distill—highlighting what is, heightening what is already there—Lopez puts this desire for essence under pressure, revealing its blind spots and unchecked assumptions. All of Lopez’s BLUE ANGELS bear the immense strain of the artist’s own body and/or tools pressing upon the material at hand. The ensuing sculptures cast attention to the spaces between—literally, materially, discursively—to unsettle the assumed primacy of sculptural presence in favor of absence, an aesthetics of deflation instead of erection.

In BOY (REVISITED), Lopez suspends a car door sourced and appropriated from a junkyard and flocked entirely in brown velvet nylon: a chromatic return to the skin of BOY and abaca manila rope in works like ROPE HINGE. Its exterior is mangled and bashed; its window devoid of glass; its interior stripped, wiring and machinery splayed out like industrial viscera. A synecdoche for the car and its moment of collision, the door is made foreign yet uncannily familiar. Here lies a study in industrial anatomy, a sculpture mid-mummification. Its surface exists as both skin and flesh, haunted and repurposed; its substrate becomes one haunted by industry, violence, and recuperation’s very limits.

The final piece, HOOD (KYKLOS REVISITED), revisits a work displayed only once and brought out from deep storage by the artist. Made during the initial phase of BLUE ANGELS, the aluminum form was originally a freestanding, white hooded sculpture with one laser-cut circle revealing a black interior: a reference to the cloaked figures of the Ku Klux Klan. Lopez subjects KYKLOS—meaning “circle” or “epic cycle” in Greek—to a process of deflation, bending and folding the sheet before finding its resting place, slung and potentially defanged on the wall.

Lopez has devoted her practice to shaping crises in space, or cataclysms in the round. The tensions between what is apparent, absent, and immanent form the crux of the artist’s sculptural thinking, which she deftly sublimates into material, gesture, and form. In FOLDING BOY AND BLUE, the arena of bodily exertion becomes inseparable from the crucible of meaning.

–CJ Salapare

¹ The name also evokes a larger history of American military power that dovetails with Lopez’s own Filipino-American heritage. Founded in 1946 at the behest of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the Blue Angels also carry the legacy of an American naval officer who ran the USS Decatur aground off the coast of the Philippines in 1908, an incident judged negligent at the time, and who decades later would serve as the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet during World War II.

Michelle Lopez (b. 1970, Bridgeport; lives and works in New York and Philadelphia) received an MFA from School of Visual Arts, New York (1994) and a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University (1992). Lopez is an Associate Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and head of the sculpture program.