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Standing in the Shadow of the Silhouette Figure
At G Fine Art, Iván Navarro And Courtney Smith
Renee Cox put herself at the center of "Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben," featured in "She's So Articulate" at Arlington Arts Center.
(Courtesy Of The Artist)
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The work on view at G won't show you a good time. If anything, Iván Navarro and Courtney Smith (partners in life and in this exhibition) prod us with incongruous forms, cut-up, unpainted wood and the occasional fluorescent lamp. You may suspect you've entered a construction site.
In fact, this is a deconstruction site.
Here Navarro and Smith team up to critique the dark side of the modernist agenda. The Utopian spirit of modernism died with the two world wars, but it returned, in a way, in a post-World War II America, where hubris and muscle ruled the art world and politics.
Navarro shows us how we've stumbled. In a video screening at the gallery, a man stands atop the back of another man who crouches on hands and knees; both wear bags over their heads, like torture victims. Elsewhere in the show, a sculpture in fluorescent tubes and glass mimics the crouching figure's shape. Here Navarro uses the the signature bulbs of mid-century minimalist Dan Flavin -- an apolitical artist if there ever was one -- but applies them to contemporary politics (the pose suggests Abu Ghraib).
For her part, Smith revisits the forms of early-20th-century Utopian movement de Stijl, which espoused sleek forms as a way to spiritual harmony. She cuts up found furniture or constructs her own obdurate objects that recall those earlier forms but confound them, making them into hulking, useless things. They suggest that idealism can not only overwhelm reality, but also destroy it.
"She's So Articulate" at the Arlington Arts Center, 3550 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Tuesday- Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., 703-248-6800. To July 19.
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Iván Navarro and Courtney Smith at G Fine Art, 1515 14th St. NW, Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m.-6 p.m., 202-462-1601. To June 28.
