Ivan Navarro, This Land Is Your Land. Photo © Thelma Garcia
I don’t get the connection between watertanks, immigration and Woody Guthrie. Just a kitchen sink of ideas to justify the work.
NEW YORK, NY.- Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art announces a new sculptural installation for late winter 2014: This Land Is Your Land by Brooklyn-based Chilean artist Iván Navarro. The site-specific installation presents three water towers inside of which neon reflections repeat infinitely. The sculptures merge a staple of the New York skyline with the street-level landscape of the Park.
The artist takes the exhibition’s title from the beloved 1940 Woody Guthrie folk song, which is both an American anthem and a vocal pull to the freedoms offered in this country for an immigrant population. The towers are elevated to a height above visitors’ heads, allowing them to walk underneath and look up into each sculpture to view the content within. The exhibition is on view daily from February 20 – April 13, 2014 in Madison Square Park.
Navarro’s water towers—each measuring approximately seven feet in diameter and standing on roughly eight-foot-tall supports—function as vessels for a vocabulary of the political and personal experience of immigration. The interior of one tower features the words “me” and “we”, another features the word “bed”, and a third displays the image of a ladder—all of which will be composed of neon light. An internal arrangement of mirrors will enable each word or image to repeat perpetually through a seemingly endless vertical space.
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Ivan Navarro, This Land Is Your Land. Photo © Thelma Garcia
Indeed, what is the connection? there is not explicit or implicit relation between the elements chosen, neither opposition, contrast, irony on the concepts of the same. The only constant is that there are three water towers which are a boring, obvious and basic subject in NY. Two towers have words, but there is no relation between them and at least one with the subject (immigration), if it would have been a third word with no connection, it would have been a constant…but in the third tower there is a leader. Some people can’t help themselves avoiding to give a speech of saving or fixing the world, the problem is, that not necessarily transform your work in good art. What is next, a park bench named after a Bob Marley’s song and intended to save dissidents in China?