Traffic, 2016

Born 1972 in Santiago, Chile
Lives and works in New York
 
Having grown up in Santiago under Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship, New York based artist Iván Navarro is haunted by questions of power, control and imprisonment. Inspired by modern artists Gerrit Rietveld and Dan Flavin, he uses light as his raw material, developing a visual gap between appearance and truth.
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Traffic is a mobile composed of seven pairs of traffic lights that loop continuously from soft green to yellow to red. By employing the lights in this way, Navarro detaches a ubiquitous element from daily life – the urban outdoor function of the traffic light – and transforms it into a new perpetual experience, igniting an unconscious awareness of something that in ordinary use conditions the public’s psychological behavior.