Dear Reader w/ Michelle Lopez

For this iteration of Dear Reader, join interdisciplinary artist, Michelle Lopez, in an active discursive exploration of selections from Ken Lum’s Commodities reading/viewing list.

Dear Reader is a programmatic series that follows the model of an informal book club to delve into Ulises's quarterly reading lists through facilitated workshops, lectures, performances, and screenings.

Michelle Lopez is a sculptor and installation artist. As a builder, conceptualist, and manipulator of materials, Lopez inventively explores cultural phenomena, stretching to their limits the industrial processes that craft consumerism in its many forms. Lopez’s gimlet eye examines collapsed political and social structures by inverting cultural tropes through the process of building. Her installations—precarious assemblages of humble yet labor-intensive materials such as hand-twisted steel rope, pulled glass, bent wood, and street rubble—draw from the aesthetic languages and histories of industrialization, art movements, and the built environment to critique the ways in which dominant narratives, power, and authority shape space. Tracing her work alongside queer and feminist lineages of abstraction, as well as a rigorous research process into her materials, Lopez makes a case for the formal and political stakes of a present-day sculptural practice.

Lopez’s WHEN UNDER ONE SKY, currently installed on the exterior of Ray Philly, is a public artwork that is in search for unity and commonality. The project attempts to create a series of reparations to the erasures that have happened historically in terms of class, ethnicity, and race, and also to acknowledge these same divisions of difference that are happening nationally and locally with the recent uprisings. The sentiment of protecting neighborhood still pervades despite differences.

Light refreshements provided.

Host or Publisher Ray Philly