NY Observer, 11 Things to Do in New York’s Art World Before Feb. 27 b
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24
Opening Reception: PS3* Pedro Sanchez 3, “On the Outer Edge” at Abrons Arts Center
Based on Brazilian favelas and constructed from found materials from the Lower East Side, Spanish-born New York-based artist Pedro Sanchez 3 (aka PS3*) exhibits a full-scale home within which he presents new video work. His model home, designed for a life of “deliberate deprivation,” presents the contemporary dwelling space as a response to the desire for affordable housing and a need for a smaller carbon footprint, and falls in line within a movement steadily gaining ground, which has been known to favor an “aesthetics of decline” that trades up bling for blight. —R.J.
Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.
Based on Brazilian favelas and constructed from found materials from the Lower East Side, Spanish-born New York-based artist Pedro Sanchez 3 (aka PS3*) exhibits a full-scale home within which he presents new video work. His model home, designed for a life of “deliberate deprivation,” presents the contemporary dwelling space as a response to the desire for affordable housing and a need for a smaller carbon footprint, and falls in line within a movement steadily gaining ground, which has been known to favor an “aesthetics of decline” that trades up bling for blight. —R.J.
Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.
PS3* PEDRO SANCHEZ3: ON THE OUTER EDGE
The Abrons Arts Center is pleased to announce On the Outer Edge, an exhibition by Spanish-born New York based artist PS3* Pedro Sanchez3 in the Upper Main Gallery. The artist presents a new video work in his full-scale model home designed for a life of deliberate deprivation. Based on Brazilian favelas and built from materials found in and around the Lower East Side, this continually adaptable structure participates in an international language of habitation. Dwellings like the one presented in this exhibition are a global response to poverty — usually inhabited by immigrants or slave workers in the suburbs of large cities in Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Morocco, and many other African and Asian countries.
This (anti-)utopian dwelling uses the leftovers of capitalist production to re-negotiate contemporary living spaces. Rather than looking to state-of-the-art materials and advanced construction technologies PS3* poses bricolage as a solution to the need for an affordable, easily transportable and environmentally efficient house. We are presented with a porous and ephemeral structure that challenges the notion of the self-enclosed, permanent home and puts in its place a model of community living sustained by creative reconstruction, mobility, and change.
Installed in the favela is a video of schizoid scenes from dance clubs, street bazaars, and arcades, cropped and blurred to the brink of abstraction. The video suggests a passage through temporary spaces filled with life, music, metallic surfaces, and darkened shadows. It conjures a dream experience of so many not-quite-recognizable cities floating by in disjointed stop light animation that barrels toward, but never reaches, total saturation and exhaustion.
In this moment of worldwide occupations On the Outer Edge redirects the gaze of the revolutionary spirit away from central urban spaces and towards the incongruous fringes of the social. The dialogue between the video and dwelling structure embraces transience, for better or worse, as a mode of living. Eschewing the notion of a linear timeline that moves forward in the name of progress, PS3* deploys a circular temporality of reuse and revision. The ambiguous locations of the video and transient space of the favela appear not simply as the dysphoric remains of global capitalism but as permeable laboratories for rethinking the future.
PS3* Pedro Sanchez 3 was born in Madrid and lives and works in New York. He has exhibited internationally in such venues as De Chiara & Stuart Gallery, New York, MC Gallery, New York, MILLENNIUM “Personal Cinema Series”, New York, Christopher Henry Gallery, New York, The Cannes Film Festival, France, Plaza Gallery, Tokyo. Stripe House Gallery, Tokyo. TSUTAYA TOKYO ROPPONGI, Tokyo, Okurayama Gallery, Yokohama, Japan, FEM6: Festival Edition Madrid 2006. 57 Gallery, Madrid, and East End Open Studios, London, organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London