Christine Egaña Navin: Hot Swap

February 1 - March 16, 2025

Christine Egaña Navin
Hot Swap
February 1 - March 16, 2025  

Laura (the gallery)
1125 E 11th St, Houston, TX

Laura (the gallery) is pleased to announce Hot Swap, a new solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Christine Egaña Navin. Comprising an 11-channel video installation, the exhibition positions technology as both protagonist and paradox, exploring the systems that mediate our experience of energy, power, and representation.

Hot Swap deftly unravels the tangled circuitry of technological dependency through her meticulously engineered multi-channel video installation. In the center of the gallery, three monitors are hardwired into a sculptural configuration, rendering the likeness of a Honda 3500S gas-powered generator—its whirring hum replaying endlessly, an exercise of functionality and futility. Nearby, four video screens converge to construct a propane tank. Both video-objects rest on a virtual “pedestal” that loops the gallery floor. The installation’s pixelated luminescence emphasizes the total sense of simulation in Navin’s work, digital ghosts that displace the “real” objects they depict.

Drawing inspiration from Nam June Paik’s techno-meditations and the time-honored tradition of trompe-l’œil, Navin offers a trick of the eye for the twenty-first century that is as self-revealing as it is deceptive. Video screens, consuming energy to depict the mechanics of energy generation, transform the gallery into an energy system—where representation and reality are mutually dependent. This self-reflexive cycle probes the uncanny intersection of power and its simulation: emergency generators, consuming electricity to depict power itself, collapse into their own conceptual failure during moments of crisis. The title Hot Swap references the practice of repairing a computer system while the power remains turned on.

Houston—a city built on energy—provides a fitting backdrop, and Hot Swap extends a commentary on power itself, confronting viewers with a sense of technological dependency and its aesthetic. From the white noise hum of power grids to the mediated glow of digital screens, the installation oscillates between technological alchemy and existential inquiry.

Hot Swap will be on view from February 1, 2025, through March 16, 2025. An opening reception will take place on February 1, from 2 PM to 5 PM.

About the artist

Christine Egaña Navin (b. 1986, Nyack, NY) is a queer Cuban American artist. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014 and her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2008. Navin’s work has recently been shown at the MCA Denver, MOCA Virginia Beach, Mana Contemporary, as well as galleries including Jack Barrett, New York; Marinaro, New York; 77 Mulberry, New York; Page Bond Gallery, Richmond; Catbox Contemporary, Queens; and Flowerbox Projects, Miami.