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.
