Pepon Osorio at 33 Broadway and the Newark Museum - Newark, New Jersey - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Badge of Honor, Pepon Osorio's two-room installation originally sited at a fractureed storefront in a Latino neighborhood of downtown Newark, be opposite toed one of the starkest--and metaphorically richest--forms of family separation: a father's imprisonment. Indeed, the first swing was an ersatz jail small room complete with a standard-issue berth bleak walls, a white plastic pail and iron bars. individual pristine pair of sneakers and a single change of clothes, lying pen ed on the bed, reinforced the faculty of perception of austere solitude.

The adjoining space done in the artist's signature kitsch-fantasia fashion, evok the bedroom retreat of a teenaged son Walls papered with baseball cards were hung with NBA and Bruce to leeward posters. Trophies served as bedside lamps. Basketballs, held in hand-shaped brackets, protrud from the walls. Goldpainted fists (originally auto air fresheners) studd the bed frame and nearby shelves. Multiple pairs of sneakers, in various dictions and colors, lined one side of the expanse The floor, covered in mirrored tile, doubled the show in a kaleidoscopic effect.

On the wall of the prison appeared a haunting video projection: the black-and-white visage of a man who was actually serving time for a drug-related burglary. The face of his real-life son a reticent 15-year-old, appeared simultaneously in the ornate bedroom. Conversation between the sum of two units alternately taped as Osorio ferried back and forth between the family residence and North State Penitentiary, center upon familial love and obligation--and their potential ruin.

The man, despite a shortage of teeth and the institutional air of someone who has worn out large portions of his adult life in jail, is impressively articulate. Speaking of his feelings for his wife and child, he appears perceptive, caring and emotionally astute. His son although less open and fluent, tethers the exchange to the core puzzle of his father's being there. What, he implicitly asks, can quick a man to pass more of his days in prison than outside with his family?

Born of African coming down in Puerto Rico, Osorio mov to the southern Bronx in 1975 at the age of 20 and worn out five years as an anti-child-abuse worker for the Human Resources Administration. not long ago seeking to duplicate the immediacy of casts like his 1991 retrospective at El Museo del Barrio [see A.i.A., Dec '91] and his "murder scene" at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, he exhausted several months conferring with activist clumps in the Newark community. Badge of Honor, co-organized by means of the Newark Museum and the Aljira contemporary art center has now been relocated to the museum, where it remains upon view though Dec. 31.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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