NYAB Event - “Stage #1: Mario Navarro, Forms of Otherness” Exhibition

“Stage #1: Mario Navarro, Forms of Otherness” Exhibition

The International Studio & Curatorial Program

This event has ended.

In Forms of Otherness, Mario Navarro has produced a site specific project in which two geometric shapes have been placed upon Staging’s platform, along with several groupings of plants indigenous to Kings County. The geometric forms are each embedded with an interiorfacing mirror, leading them to encounter and reflect one another as well as the organic material.

The installation is a sustained referential interaction in which all elements are mutually allowing and denying their own limits. From the biological, to the industrial, to the artistic, productivity appears to have remained as the overarching impulse. Site is a collection of residues of past productions and spaces; mirrors, either as a space for encounter or for fiction. The mirrors’ alignment in a single diagonal line points, simultaneously, to the first attempts to conceptualize a functional city in the linear investigations of the Spanish urban planner Arturo Soria, and to the radical architectural research of late Italian firm Superstudio.

The reintroduction of native species into Bushwick gestures toward the varied historical modes of production which converge here: the virgin, swampy landscape of preindustry, the first industrial buildings and constructions, and now an arts scene appropriating the ruins of an industrial age. The juxtaposition of the species here enhances the physical distinctions of each, gifting the plants with an almost anthropomorphic quality. The presence of these plants also unveils Navarro’s dissection of the function of architecture and architectures; one plant after another does not constitute a landscape inasmuch as one brick after another does not constitute a building. Borrowing the garden as sign, Navarro points to the act of leisure as a pivotal, yet failed, condition of the urban utopia, a continuing concern of Navarro’s practice.

Mario Navarro (1984), is a Mexican American artist based in New York City. The formal aesthetics and syntax to which Navarro returns stand as alternative references to certain classes of objects, just as words do not referto things themselves. In Navarro’s practice, objects and architectures operate as nodes of meaning and conceptual signification within a broader system of relations. Therefore, he creates a metaclass of language that questions both architecture and the way we look at it.