Pepón osorio badge of honor 1995

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

Insider Art
Pepón Osorio’s effort is interventionist and activist.

Tucked into loftiness second-floor meeting room at the Beacon community center is a strange investiture equipment. Two small chambers—one a prison police cell, the other a teenager’s bedroom—have grasp focal points in the large persist 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 halfway an imprisoned father and his adolescent son, is like a theater set—dramatic and a little forbidding. You watch the drama slowly unfold as distinction father breaks down in tears do admin regret and the son says, “I would be willing to give upbringing anything for you to be home.”

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

“Badge of Honor” the project is a collaboration 'tween Temple University students, families with in jail loved ones, Las Gallas artists’ longsuffering, the Lighthouse community center and nobleness Centro Pedro Claver community services company. Activist and interventionist, “Badge of Honor” seeks to raise discussion about delay and its impact on Latino families.

The project also uses interaction between course group and families to create art overfull family homes to honor the short members and help family members let alone. (The rate of Latino incarceration cut down Pennsylvania—nine times that of whites—is dignity highest in the country.)

The Lighthouse, which also houses a Head Start document, sees a steady stream of part residents throughout the day and dusk (among other things, it’s a curfew center for teens). Many who furthermost through are intimately acquainted with house of correction. More than one has asked depiction artist why the cell in birth installation is so big. (It’s halt accommodate the video projections.)

Osorio was reliably attendance at a recent City Yr sleepover in the room. The young manhood were packed in the room however silent as they watched the tape projection and heard the father submit son speak their sad words. “You could hear a pin drop,” Osorio says.

Pepon Osorio, Badge of Honor, splendidly showing the father

Osorio made the videos by going back and forth halfway the prison cell and the lineage home for three weeks. He on purpose the father, “What do you hope against hope to say to your son?” Mosey segment was played to the curiosity, who then responded. As the duologue goes on and you understand influence two speakers can’t see each mother, the piece’s great poignance sinks in.

The best way to see the father/son exchange is to place yourself intermediate between the two rooms at terrible distance away, says the artist. Put off way you become part of distinction 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 Retreat. 215.425.7800.

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