Happiness is a state of inertia

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
September 12 - November 9

The drone may be the mythic bird of our generation. Iñigo’s first solo exhibition at Monique Meloche pushes this near invisible idea into the very palpable present.  Upon entering the gallery, one is immediately face to nose with what appears to be the fat end of a large wooden airplane wing. The structure moves in a line diagonally across the space, with it’s outermost and smallest end nearly touching the high corner of the galleries main space. People are free to walk around and underneath the wing that slices through the imaginary space somewhere between Monique and Meloche. The wing is wooden with something of a transparent tissue paper like outer coating. With a little prying, one will come to realize that the wing is handcrafted to the specifications of a predator drone wing. This begins the budding post-911 discourse that the work opens up. Over the last ten years Iñigo has worked with ideas of visibility and invisibility, paranoia, and their relationship to modernist structures including the military. Happiness is a state of inertia asserts itself thoughtfully within this trajectory. The reproduction predator drone wing recalls Iñigo’s Phantom Truck, which was originally produced for Documenta 12 in 2007. That work, a scale reproduction of a mobile weaponry lab described, but never actually found by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in his address to the United Nations before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Phantom Truck is a realized version of Colin Powell’s description, though without those walls which concealed the supposed laboratory. The work exists as a sort of mythical red herring, the exposed contents of said weapons laboratory are left to be interpreted by the viewer in room who’s pitch-blackness is as informative as it is illusive. The drone wing in Monique Meloche functions similarly, though instead of a lightless room the exhibition space is full of natural light… and the wing is white.  The work exists as a handmade reproduction of what is some of the most elite aerial warfare technology that exists today. The drone aircraft's invisibility and perceptual intangibility are challenged in the painstakingly handcrafted nature of the work’s creation. The subtler works that are to be discovered in the space reinforce the inertia of this aerial unmanned discourse.  Leaning against the back wall at about one meter in height are two sides of a predator drone propeller, again hand crafted out of wood. The original drone propellers were also made of wood, so what differentiates these in particular is the way they were made. Iñigo, and I’m not sure but I can assume an assistant or two whittle the propellers with a knife, as if they were a bit of timber laying around a campfire. The act of whittling denotes an idle or thoughtless scraping of wood with a knife, often to a point, and more often without intent. Whittling in the present is a process derived from and driven by an idle time or an anxious feeling.  Whittling is also an extension of ancient man’s necessity to make weaponry for hunting or combat, however in 2013, the use of this process is peculiar. No less peculiar is the exactness of the propeller blades in relation to the process of their creation. Flanking the propeller blades on one of the longer walls in the room is a set of three photographs of what appears to be a predator drone in the sky. Also visible in the photographs are the tops of some trees and what appear to be a pole and some sort of string, which might initially be mistaken for what many conspiracy theorists refer to as chemtrails. These photographs further confound an understanding of the predator drone’s scale. In media distributed photographs of predator drones we see the aircraft in the sky, and away from any cultural signifiers that would allow the viewer a clear understanding of the object’s scale. Also, one can’t help but consider their relation to John Baldessari’s Throwing Three Balls In The Air To Get A Straight Line. However, where Baldessari was using chance as a catalyst for the work, Iñigo seems painfully aware the drone model’s suspension by wire. This exhibition does as much to disrupt as it does to reveal any understanding of the drone’s physical makeup. The 1:1 replica drone wing is massive in relation to any previous understanding of the aircraft’s size, and what are revealed to be photographs of a tiny drone model dangled by the artist from a string and pole do as much to ground the viewer as they do to distort their perception. Despite the very clear subject matter in this exhibition, the subject is boiling over into territory that extends well beyond the very literal right wing in the space.     –KW