Through Summer 2020

Michelle Lopez: Ballast & Barricades

Michelle Lopez: Ballast & Barricades, 2019, installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo by: Constance Mensh.
About

In Ballast & Barricades Michelle Lopez employs a formal, fragmented architectural language to critique symbols of nationalism, power, and consumption. Known for her sculptural works that recast histories of minimalism and everyday objects through a feminist lens, in this exhibition Lopez brings together a selection of recent sculptures alongside a monumental, site-specific installation that creates a suspended cityscape reduced to rubble. Here, blockades, borders, flags, and natural elements bleed together while remnants of construction sites and scaffolding create a delicate system of counterweights and counterbalances—all meticulously crafted by hand. For Lopez, this sculptural terrain is suggestive of an ongoing history of bodies and violence in the absence of figuration. It is an urban landscape fabricated out of the material remains of crisis, teetering on the brink of collapse.

— Alex Klein, Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE’60) Curator

Michelle Lopez: Ballast & Barricades is organized by Alex Klein, Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE’60) Curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication.

Michelle Lopez (b. 1970; lives Philadelphia) has been included in solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; LAXART, Los Angeles; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; the Public Art Fund, Metrotech Center, NY; and the Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA. Formerly a faculty member at Yale School of Art, she now heads the Sculpture Division at the Fine Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. In 2019 she was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In Conversation: Michelle Lopez and Jenn Joy

Installation view of Michelle Lopez: Ballast & Barricades
Michelle Lopez: Ballast & Barricades (detail), 2019, installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.

In the lead-up to Ballast & Barricades, Researcher and Senior Critic in Sculpture at Yale School of Art Jenn Joy talked with Michelle Lopez about how her “work forces a negotiation of sculpture as an aperture for perception, asking how histories sediment in objects and how we might understand something of immateriality through surface tension”.

Read the full conversation here.

Support

Programming support for Michelle Lopez: Ballast & Barricades has been provided by the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation and the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation, and support for the catalogue publication has been provided by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Foundation. Additional support has been provided by Linda & Jeffrey Chodorow, Carol & John Finley, Kirk Kirkpatrick, Marjorie & Michael Levine, Amanda & Andrew Megibow, B.Z. & Michael Schwartz, Meredith & Bryan Verona, and by Caroline & Daniel Werther.

Installation Views
Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 1PM–2PM
Pennsight Drop-In Tour led by Kyle Whiting
Thu, Feb 6, 2020, 6:30PM–8PM
Weitzman Lecture: Michelle Lopez
Books & Editions
Michelle Lopez: Ballast & Barricades book cover

Order your copy today from artbook.com!

In Ballast & Barricades Michelle Lopez employs a formal, fragmented architectural language to critique symbols of nationalism, power, and consumption. In this suspended cityscape reduced to rubble, blockades, borders, flags, and natural elements bleed together while remnants of construction sites and scaffolding create a delicate system of counterweights and counterbalances—all meticulously crafted by hand. For Lopez, this sculptural terrain suggests an ongoing history of bodies and violence in the absence of figuration. It is an urban landscape fabricated out of the material remains of crisis, teetering on the brink of collapse.

This full-color catalog documents Lopez’s dizzying, site-specific intervention in the ICA gallery alongside a group of recent sculptures and reproductions of select works from the past two decades. New essays by Aruna D’Souza and ICA curator Alex Klein provide art historical context and unpack the geopolitical resonances within Lopez’s project. These concerns are further explored in an edited conversation between Lopez, artists Paul Pfeiffer and Josh Kline, and curator Joselina Cruz, that ruminates on the complexities of Filipinx identity, postcolonial cultural production, and the rise of authoritarianism.

Dimensions
7.5 x 10 inches
ISBN
9780884541516
Pages
160
Binding
Paperback
Publisher
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
Year
2021
$30.00
ISBN 9780884541516
Publication Date
2021
Authors
Aruna D'Souza, Alex Klein, Joselina Cruz, Josh Kline, and Paul Pfeiffer
Designer
Mark Owens
Authors
Aruna D'Souza, Alex Klein, Joselina Cruz, Josh Kline, and Paul Pfeiffer
Publisher
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
Price
$30.00
Support for Michelle Lopez: Ballast & Barricades programming has been provided by the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation and the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation. Programming at ICA has been made possible in part by the Emily and Jerry Spiegel Fund to Support Contemporary Culture and Visual Arts and the Lise Spiegel Wilks and Jeffrey Wilks Family Foundation, and by Hilarie L. & Mitchell Morgan.