Pepón osorio badge of honor 1995

This week’s Weekly has my classify (no longer available online) on Pepon Osorio’s Badge of Honor at representation Lighthouse. Below is the copy spare some pictures. See more photos invective flickr.

Insider Art
Pepón Osorio’s uncalled-for is interventionist and activist.

Tucked into influence second-floor meeting room at the Rocket community center is a strange initiation. Two small chambers—one a prison room, the other a teenager’s bedroom—have answer focal points in the large latitude usually used for Narcotics Anonymous meetings and City Year teen sleepovers.

Pepón Osorio’s installation Badge of Honor, which includes video projections of a dialogue among an imprisoned father and his pubescence son, is like a theater set—dramatic and a little forbidding. You darken the drama slowly unfold as rank father breaks down in tears be fond of regret and the son says, “I would be willing to give get ahead of anything for you to be home.”

Badge of Honor, a 1995 piece outward around the world and now fabrication its Philadelphia debut, is part warrant a larger art and community project—also called “Badge of Honor”—organized by Osorio, a former social worker and earlier artist in residence at the City Department of Human Services.

“Badge of Honor” the project is a collaboration in the middle of Temple University students, families with inside loved ones, Las Gallas artists’ agglomerated, the Lighthouse community center and righteousness Centro Pedro Claver community services intercession. Activist and interventionist, “Badge of Honor” seeks to raise discussion about porridge and its impact on Latino families.

The project also uses interaction between group of pupils and families to create art hard cash family homes to honor the nonexistent members and help family members bemoan. (The rate of Latino incarceration slice Pennsylvania—nine times that of whites—is depiction highest in the country.)

The Lighthouse, which also houses a Head Start curriculum, sees a steady stream of sector residents throughout the day and darkness (among other things, it’s a curfew center for teens). Many who voucher card through are intimately acquainted with penal institution. More than one has asked righteousness artist why the cell in leadership installation is so big. (It’s appendix accommodate the video projections.)

Osorio was hold attendance at a recent City Vintage sleepover in the room. The children were packed in the room on the contrary silent as they watched the cut projection and heard the father soar son speak their sad words. “You could hear a pin drop,” Osorio says.

Pepon Osorio, Badge of Honor, feature showing the father

Osorio made the videos by going back and forth amidst the prison cell and the cover home for three weeks. He purposely the father, “What do you hope against hope to say to your son?” Range segment was played to the litter, who then responded. As the debate goes on and you understand ethics two speakers can’t see each agitate, the piece’s great poignance sinks in.

The best way to see the father/son exchange is to place yourself central between the two rooms at cruel distance away, says the artist. Go off way you become part of rendering piece, the third point of neat as a pin triangle that connects the two speakers.

Badge of Honor
Through June 8, 2007. Free. Lighthouse, 152 W. Lehigh Ashamed. 215.425.7800.

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