Above photos by Lindsay Thorne
With Michelle Lopez’s most recent show A Silent Bear It Away currently on display at the Simon Preston Gallery, we had the chance to meet over coffee and talk about the comings and goings of herself and her art.
What brought you to New York?
Came to go to Barnard up in Colombia University, and studied art history and english, with minor in Art. Just in general though, the energy is just so palpable and i always feel very inspired here, so even after moving away to Berkley to teach, I felt the need to come back. So i got my MFA at SVA and studied sculpture and now teach there.
photo by Lindsay Thorne
Your last solo show was two days after 9/11 at Deitch Projects. Howd that go?
That was intense. It was the reason why I left New York to teach in Berkley. Yea it was just a very different time. My show was supposed to open 9/13 and got pushed to 9/22. I almost wish it hadn’t opened at all. The show was pretty much a wash. I suppose it kinda had to happen that way. In a way that show was neglected and I’m kinda glad that it was because I had to grow as an artist in ways. It forced me to really examine what my position was, in terms of my art, regardless of the art world. In that sense it was really profound. Now with this new show at Simon’s its really about destiny and redemption. I was born in 1970 which is when there was the Dawsonfield Highjacking, which was a situation that was incredibly similar to the 911 attacks that happened in Jordan. Its kinda been this path where it just feels in a way my time has coincided with these events. I think it just helped me address the fact at how artists can get pigeon holed into a specific genre. For me it was being granted as this leather artist because this is one of the main materials I used at onetime. I feel like since I left New York, the one piece that people know me by is this leather car.
What does this show mean compared to the one at Deitch?
With this show ‘The Violent Bear it Away’ is this whole notion that in order to redeem myself I have destroy everything i created, and part of it is this leather car. Also I think it related to the whole political climate right now, in relation to 9/11 the way it was this real symbolic moment, in terms of how our culture was going to deal with it. Now this whole thing with the anime wig is just about being able to parody myself. THeres somehting i really never confronted which is this female asian identity thats never really discussed so I approprated that whole superflat movement thing, all with a subtext of violence. The crashing anime wig, The lynching tree with the phantom limb. Really that phantom limb is a figure of a lynched character to me. 
I‘ve noticed in your work there’s a good balance of this sort of iconic refinement and raw deteriorating aesthetic. How would you say this common strand relates to each other?
I think that word icon is good because i do try to take these cultural moment and kinda turn them on their heads in order to reveal a little bit more where it breaks down. Say with the C-3P0 mask and trying to emasculate it. There’s a lot of religious overtones in the whole star wars iconography, so i just wanted to show in some light that the iconography, at least in our culture, has become fanatical through the star wars subculture. Its just a way of exposing how that culture is problematic.
If you were a star wars character who would you be?
Probably yoda…. who would you be?
Han Solo, he has all the fun.
Use the force, what’s to come in the future of art? What are you excited about?
I have a friend who talks about this radical chic movement that is supposed to appear very clever and really is not that interesting. I’m kinda interested in how things could become political and personal at the same time. I feel like there’s all this political art that was very detached in a lot of ways, very didactic. And theres been a trend for a long time about this. The one thing I remember when I came back to New York from Berkley after doing research on “sculpture,” I hate using that word, was this whole ‘radical chic’ movement. I responded by writing an essay about the responsibility of the artist to be both conceptual and formal. I think you can be both rigorous and grotesque at the same time, so in my essay i was relating it to Georgio Gambins’s book called The Man Without Content, and it talked about transmission of culture. Would culture be transmitted once it was all gone? What if we burnt down the house, what would be interpreted from the ashes? I kinda have this ongoing theme of entropy in my work, so even though things are crumbling politically and socially, its exciting to see what the aesthetic structure turns into.
Finally, its getting warm out, what you looking forward to for the summer?
Going to the beach, we have a two year old who loves tractors.
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Michelle’s show, The Violent Bear It Away, is currently open to the public and runs until Sunday, May 17, 2009 at SIMON PRESTON GALLERY.
