For art lovers, Western Mass. awaits

That last was an unforgettable installation at Mass MoCA by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, who was born in Madrid and raised in Bogotá and Chicago. He earned degrees in art, art history, and literature at Williams College in the early 1980s, so his show at Mass MoCA, which is complemented by a screening of one his videos at the nearby Williams College Museum of Art, is a salute to an acclaimed alumnus.

The upside-down house is based on “The 50x50 House,’’ a 1951 experiment (never built) in glass-walled modular housing by the architect Mies van der Rohe. Except that homage, as so often happens, here turns to parody: The building is at half the scale, and what was once the ceiling is now the floor. All the furniture, fittings, and appliances are also upside down. Adhering to an upside-down coffee table are an ashtray, a packet of cigarettes, and a notebook.

All this is intriguing enough. But involuntary brain twitches are occasioned by two elements that don’t fit: On the “ceiling,’’ which is in fact the sculpture’s floor, lies a shattered coffee cup and a stain of spilled liquid. (I overheard several people ask whether this evidence of actual gravity, in a setting where everything else seems to defy it, was intended by the artist.)

And “on’’ the coffee table, propped against something else, is an iPhone. Every few minutes it rings, and a face appears (upright, not upside-down) and launches into a haunting monologue. Full of eloquent anxiety, the speech is addressed to the unknown owner of the phone, and although hints are provided, nothing quite adds up.