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.

In this exhibition, Lopez’s recent sculptures come 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 can also be experienced 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.   Michelle Lopez: Pandemonium is curated by Cole Akers, Curator at The Glass House and Erica F. Battle, Curator, BATTLE Projects, in  collaboration with Gabrielle Lavin Suzenski, Rochelle F. Levy Director & Chief Curator of The Galleries at Moore.

The project is presented concurrently at Moore College of Art & Design and at the Fels Planetarium in partnership with the Franklin Institute. The exhibition has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Research and production funding provided by Guggenheim Fellowship, The University of Pennsylvania University Research Foundation, University of Pennsylvania Undergraduate Research Mentorship Program, The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and the Knight Art + Technology Expansion Fellowship.

All works courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council.

We invite you to visit The Franklin Institute two blocks away to see Pandemonium on the panoramic screen of the Fels Planetarium.

Thursdays and Saturdays at 4:00pm on the following dates:

October 4, 9, 11, 16*, 18, 23, 25, 30*

November 1, 6, 8, 13, 15*, 20, 22

December 4, 6

Free with admission to The Franklin Institute (222 N. 20th Street); no admission required for screening only. Entry is at the ground-level entrance on 20th Street, beginning at 3:30pm on the indicated dates.

*Screenings on October 16, October 30, and November 15 will feature a special talk with the artist and/or curatorial team upon conclusion of the film. No advanced registration required.

Image: Michelle Lopez, Pandemonium documentation, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.