The Franklin Institute and the Galleries at Moore College present Michelle Lopez: Pandemonium

The collaborative exhibition grows from a new partnership between Moore and The Franklin Institute to prepare students for the creative economy through hands-on learning. Pandemonium is curated by independent curators Cole Akers and Erica F. Battle, with Gabrielle Lavin Suzenski of The Galleries at Moore.

The art of deconstruction

Enter Moore College and look up: The back half of a Volkswagen Passat hangs vertically from the ceiling, as if in mid-liftoff. It’s an arresting sight, but don’t be distracted from the unassuming tabletop cases behind the admission desk. They’re key.

Lopez, a sculptor and installation artist, is an associate professor in fine arts at University of Pennsylvania. Her practice utilizes everyday construction and industrial materials to comment on processes that at once propel and threaten the modern world, such as industrialization, environmental exploitation, and computerization.

The artist’s viewpoint is clear in earlier works displayed at Moore, Smoke Clouds (2014-16) and House of Cards (2018). On first glance, you might think installation is still underway in the bright gallery. Large panes of glass (Smoke Clouds) lean against walls. Treated with silver nitrate, they appear to have come through an explosion unshattered. Now they have the look of antique mirrors on which the silvering has deteriorated.

House of Cards is a dismembered skeleton of scaffolding. Twists of steel rope bend, lean, and hang, dark lines floating in white space. Thick glass conduits drip like icicles from above. Hanging wires lasso chunks of macadam and concrete. Boulders tip off the display platform and hover in air. Everything is in tension, as though paused in mid-blast.

“A lot of my work has been deeply influenced by my experience of 9/11,” Lopez said in a 2020 interview with BOMB Magazine. “When the World Trade Center came down I really began to think more deeply about what it means to be an artist and making objects when we are surrounded by the debris of technology and people.”

Meet mechatronics

For Pandemonium, Lopez harvested a whirlwind of 20th-century debris. Carefully chosen periodicals, a blouse, collapsable paper lanterns, a teddy bear, streamers, American flags, and more billow and swirl, lift and land, moving too fast to take in.

The 30-minute, 4D video is billed as an “embodied experience,” immersing viewers. Filmed for Fels Planetarium, the project evolved over 10 years as Lopez collaborated with experts in animation, sound, VR film, and mechatronics, a specialty that develops intelligent systems through the integration of mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering.

The historic whirlwind of American media

A five-minute excerpt plays in the Galleries at Moore. There, visitors observe the same rushing chaos in a more telescoped way, gazing into an oculus in the gallery ceiling.

Whether at Moore or Fels, Pandemonium distills the feeling of urgency emanating from the screens that surround us daily: the sense of breathless anticipation that something bad is about to happen, of never catching up, no matter how fast we run, of forgetting something important, of involuntarily bracing for whatever comes next.

While Moore’s exhibition duplicates the film in miniature, the larger reason to visit is to see Lopez’s chaotic cloud stilled, revealing its contents, and the artist’s point. The items include “The New Internet,” a 1997 article from the magazine Popular Science; and a 65-year-old article, source unknown, concerned with the rising cost of hospital care and new treatments. Written before the 1960 Presidential election, “Challenge of Mounting Expenses” notes that the three main candidates (John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller) were all born at home. Also on view are the New York Times’s November 4, 1935 front page: “ROOSEVELT SWEEPS THE NATION...HIS ELECTORAL VOTE EXCEEDS 500” and a postcard-perfect view of the US Capitol on the cover of a 1950 Philadelphia Inquirer color insert: “Our Country, A Pictorial History of the United States.”

You can also glimpse “What Motivates Joseph McCarthy,” by William S. White (source and date unknown), on the US Senator who acquired power in the 1950s by accusing people of being Communists, fomenting a nationwide campaign of fear; and “Will Negroes Win in South?” from a 1960 issue of U.S. News & World Report.

And from the April 23, 2010 Inquirer, the commentary section, featuring artwork of a burning cross looming over the White House. The headline reads “When racism masquerades as something else” followed by the subhead “Don’t let the virulent hatred of Obama’s presidency – veiled in ‘policy differences’ – fool you. Just ask someone raised around bigotry.”

Answers in the wind

Two items in the Moore display stand out. A once-popular giveaway, a plastic trash bag for the car, AAA logo on front and in back, big red block letters screaming, SEND HELP. The second item is a scrap bearing the sentence, “All great revolutions have been started by a single piece of paper.”

Pandemonium parachutes visitors into a twister of American history, collapsing time to make plain the nation’s recurring cycles of overreaction and backlash, power grabs and rebalancing, corruption and correction, damage and repair. Lopez puts viewers in the eye, showing the patterns, demonstrating that people have found ways to respond, mitigating, if not completely solving, serious problems. Now it’s our turn. Circuits may be overwhelmed, zones flooded, and response mechanisms weakened, but there are answers blowing in the wind and we need to find them.

Above: A still from the Michelle Lopez film featured in Pandemonium. (Image courtesy of The Franklin Institute and The Galleries at Moore.)