Iván Navarro, Assembly Line, 2008.
From time to time, a piece seems set to run but falls to the wayside for one reason or another. A story might fall through the news hole. Features stack up: A backlog of reviews as an issue's coming together might leave no room for a recent submission, even though it's been accepted. And whether it finds a space in the next issue depends on any number of factors.
The following is a small item I wrote for Modern Painters that, unfortunately, didn't find its way into print. (And as such, it shouldn't be considered a review by that publication. But I thought that readers here in the District who saw the show might be interested nonetheless.)
Iván Navarro's Assembly Line is an open metal toolbox, inside which the artist has placed a fluorescent light bulb between a mirror and a one-way mirror. Standing over it and peering down, the viewer sees a series of light tubes descending into eternity—a staircase that eventually appears to wind, owing to slight, accumulated refractions. For Blank Verse (Armoire), Courtney Smith repurposes pieces of furniture, lacquered white and arranged in a dense geometric block, their original constituent functions anonymized and bent to a design that suggests modularity but is totally prohibitive. "Remake," a joint show at G Fine Art, finds both artists (who each hail from South America and now share a life together in New York) contributing distinct visions about objects, function, and application. Smith has based her the shape of her works loosely around the Tangram, a familiar Chinese geometry puzzle that was likely based on a Song Dynasty furniture set. New forms in the absence of function are the focus of Smith's Tangram, featuring squares and triangle shape blocks hacked out of whole chests-of-drawers. Knobs, handles, and gaps delineating shelves appear decorative and use-less. Navarro, on the other hand, has approached the show from a political bent: In a video installation titled The Missing Monument for Washington, D.C., he celebrates Victor Jara, a Chilean poet and political activist who was tortured and machine gunned during the U.S.–backed military coup that established Pinochet's junta. The work reflects the social prerogative hinted at by his sculpture, in which workaday materials give a glimpse of eternity. But it is Smith's overriding interest in frustration that dominates the show. In their single collaborative piece, Navarro has set a lightbulb-and-mirror abyss in the center of a rickety platform Smith made from shelves and other bits of loose furniture—which obstructs, or at least challenges, the viewer looking in.
Iván Navarro and Courtney Smith, Kitchen Sink, 2008.
