Throughout her career, artist Michelle Lopez has explored the long-held expectations of sculpture by pushing physical forms to the brink. She trades the assumed solidity of her industrial materials—such as steel and glass—for unstable and precarious impulses that undermine monumentality and challenge the rules of built and social environments. By underscoring process and manipulating ideas of finality, she invites us to consider the potential for change, collapse, and fracture in her objects, which also draw potent parallels to the palpable uncertainty of social and political conditions of our times.

In this exhibition, Lopez’s recent sculptures came together with her commissioned multimedia installation, Pandemonium. Pushing themes of entropy, chaos, and mutability into new artistic territory, Pandemonium gives shape to terror and awe through the riotous beauty of a tornado. Swirling archival newspapers, clothing, flags, and refuse, along with a digitally animated crumbling brick ceiling create a tumultuous and balletic whirlwind. For Lopez, this sudden and sublime maelstrom is not merely a natural phenomenon, but a powerful symbol for the ways in which civil liberties, histories of progress, and reliable information can be upended in an instant.

Seen as an installation for the first time in the Galleries at Moore, Pandemonium was also presented in the vast panorama of the Fels Planetarium at The Franklin Institute nearby, for which it was originally imagined. Tackling the expanse of the domed planetarium, Lopez creates an embodied experience at the intersection of beauty and chaos.