Spotlight Review

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Gravity Is A Force To Be Reckoned With
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art • North Adams, MA • www.massmoca.org • Through October 31, 2010

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is intrigued by gravity—both the theory, as well as serious matters—and his installation at MASS MoCA explores both. Formerly a nineteenth-century complex of factory buildings in North Adams, MASS MoCA, and its sheer enormity, can easily amaze and overtake the viewer.

The main installation is located about three-quarters into the hulking gallery. To reach it, viewers traverse an empty expanse not entirely filled by the installation. Even so, Manglano-Ovalle’s installation commands its presence where it carefully and curiously sits.

Approaching Manglano-Ovalle’s twenty-five-by-twenty-five-foot glass-encased square, one discovers that the floor of this model of a house’s interior is suspended from the ceiling. Closer to the exhibit, one can hear an iPhone ring. Around the corner, one sees the phone sitting upon an upside-down coffee table. Two short messages/monologues play every four minutes and briefly animate the small screen.

This installation is a model of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s incomplete project, a the fifty-by-fifty-foot Glass House with Four Columns (1951), a square structure with glass walls that make it viewable from all four sides. In Manglano-Ovalle’s work, the design is spare. All interior elements are installed upside down, including Mies-designed furniture; partition walls; cherry wood panels; black leather chairs with stainless steel legs; and a modular, galley-style kitchen. Only a few objects are visible. On a counter, there is a coffee press and a spoon. On one table sits a pencil, a flower, a sketch, and a package of cigarettes. Even though the interior is upside down, only one thing has fallen: a broken—and spilled—cup of coffee. The old saying, “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” comes to mind—and sticks.

Before completely seeing the installation, sounds from the next section of the gallery beckon. Is something breaking? A nine-minute video exploring shattering glass plays in the dark exhibition space beneath the loft-like balcony. The sounds are loud, like an earthquake or an erupting volcano; a combination of image and sound evoke the idea that something monumental has occurred. The camera pulls back to reveal the glass. Images of legs walking by transform this into a quotidian experience, rather than a catastrophic one.

The location of the video installation accomplishes two interesting things. First, the sounds of glass breaking and the phone ringing, though emerging from the different spaces in the room, can be heard simultaneously. Second, the perspective played within the video is echoed once the viewer ascends the staircase and arrives at the balcony-like loft space. From this high angle, peering down into the main gallery space, everything about the house’s model appears different. What seemed so much larger in the long walk appears smaller on high. A cardboard box sits atop the installation (the box is mentioned in one of the phone messages). It seems small and almost happenstance, but it curiously draws the viewer back to learn more. On the back wall is a sketch of the model with this quote: Well, now, fallen angel. You, I’d say, are now lost. This exhibition is dislocating. Yes, one does become lost. But gravity, Manglano-Ovalle reminds us, enables us to be grounded, to be located.

 — Sarah Buttenwieser