Artist Michelle Lopez is joined by writer and musician Anne Ishii, to dive into the creative choices behind Pandemonium that have expanded upon recurrent themes in Lopez’s work.
Anne Ishii is the program director at United States Artists, and until the summer of 2024, executive director of Asian Arts Initiative. She is the co-chair of National Performance Network and of the Asian American Writers Workshop. Anne is a writer and musician. As a percussionist, she performs in many arrangements, including the trio Totally Automatic. She is a writer and editor by trade with a background in Japanese letters. Her work hinges on issues relating to gender and sexuality. In 2013 she co-founded MASSIVE GOODS: a lifestyle brand and arts agency representing queer erotica and feminist artists from Japan. MASSIVE has produced multiple volumes of graphic novels and a line of clothing and accessories. She has been published in BUST, Nylon, Slate, Publishers Weekly, the Village Voice, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and many others. She has translated and rewritten over twenty books.
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 the social and political conditions of our times.
