Iván Navarro
January 17 — March 30, 2008
New Media Wall, Remis Scupture Court, and Koppelman Gallery

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 17, 5:30–8:30 pm

Iván Navarro’s light sculptures glow and buzz with color and electrical current, transforming utilitarian objects (the shopping cart, the wheelbarrow, the door, the ladder) into radiant yet foreboding forms with double meanings. Although the seductive glow of his sculptures draws us in, the threat of being burned or electrocuted keeps us at arm’s length.  Navarro’s videos, set to popular Latin ballads, cast the portable sculptures as protagonists engaged in nomadic, existential journeys, forging ahead against dark, unseen forces.  A monumental sculptural installation coalesces anxieties about darkened spaces, surveillance via one-way mirrors, confusing distortions of spatial depth, and a detached, psychological “limbo space” imbued with the sound of a disco cover of the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man.”

Navarro investigates the dark side of light: the symbolic relationship between the electrical currents activating the lighting fixtures that are his sculptural building blocks and the political and social undercurrents of fear that have informed his development.  Born in 1972 in Santiago, Chile, Navarro came of age under the repressive dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and during the heyday of Minimalism, the artistic movement that made a lasting impression on him while in art school in Chile during the early 1990s. Navarro responds to and critiques these political and aesthetic milieus through his art. “I make spaces in a fictional way to deal with my own psychological anxiety,” he says. 

Living in New York City since 1996, he makes politically charged work that is highly sensitive to the disinformation campaigns of dictatorships and the double talk of liberal democracies in caring for the poor and the homeless. He recasts iconic Minimalist and Modernist forms as humanitarian “social sculptures” whose light aims to illuminate the nebulous and nefarious undercurrents of both authoritarian and democratic societies. However, the light is artificial and requires a “parasitical” relationship with its source of energy, underscoring the double bind of the individual and the system.  Navarro’s work eloquently represents a no-man’s-land of double-edged meanings.

Amy Ingrid Schlegel, director, Tufts University Art Gallery

On the New Media Wall
Homeless lamp, the juice sucker, 2004-05
Variable dimensions Sculpture (40 x 52 x 30 inches) and video (4:16 minutes): Fluorescent tubes, metal fixtures, wheels and electrical energy from a lamppost in the street.

A video tells the story of a wandering urban parasite (a shopping cart made of fluorescent light tubes) tapping into municipal energy sources to illuminate itself.

In the Koppelman Gallery
Flashlight: I’m not from here I’m not from there, 2006
Sculpture (34 x 34 x 76 inches) and video (8:00 minutes): Fluorescent tubes, metal fixtures, color plastic sleeves, electric generator and electric energy.

A sculpture of a wheelbarrow made of fluorescent light tubes is featured in the space; a video also plays in which the colored tubes are manually changed repeatedly by an itinerant protagonist - from yellow to purple, green, blue, and finally red.

In the Remis Sculpture Court
Die Again (Monument for Tony Smith), 2006
12 x 12 x 12 ft.

A 12-foot black plywood cube riffs off of Tony Smith’s 1962 6-foot steel cubes. Wall and floor light boxes inside the dark chamber suggest endless space. An acoustic version of the Beatles’ "Nowhere Man" reflects the transient experience of the expatriate and the limbo of the “disappeared” of Pinochet’s violent reign.

Iván Navarro and his work were profiled in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on November 4, 2007. Click here for the story!

Click here for an essay on Navarro's works by Tufts University graduate student Nina Bozicnik.