Ivan Navarro

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

The Tufts University Art Gallery presents three works by Ivan Navarro in three of its gallery spaces. Ivan Navarro’s disjunctive light installations and video projects synthesize inspiration from both the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and the contemporary contradictions of liberal democracy to remind the viewer that truth is often an illusion.

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.

This 4:18 minute video tells the story of the “Homeless Lamp, the juice sucker”, a wandering urban parasite that taps into municipal energy sources to illuminate itself. The accompanying sculpture represents a shopping cart and is made entirely out of fluorescent light fixtures and tubes.

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.

Colored sleeves and fluorescent tubing take the form of a wheelbarrow while an accompanying video documents a performance in which a solitary character wheels his cart along desolate train tracks, periodically stopping to change the color of its lights. The action is set to the song of the same title by Julio Iglesias, which also tells the story of a resourceful drifter as he wanders the city.

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

This black plywood cube alludes to Tony Smith's famous cube-shape, Minimalist sculpture, ''Die.'' Enter a doorway, move spirally, and you arrive at a dark inner chamber, where the five neon-lighted points of a white star built into the floor under glass appear to recede infinitely downward because of built-in mirrors.

Ivan Navarro
New Media Wall, Remis Scupture Court, and Koppelman Gallery