Two-Room Installation Hits Home With Emotion

The piece is both unusual and familiar, funny, touching and ominous. Installed in the main gallery of the Otis College of Art and Design in Westchester, it’s titled “Badge of Honor” and concerns a conversation between a teenage boy and his jailed father.

The artist is Puerto Rican Pepon Osorio, 40, now living in New York. His educational credentials are a little unusual for an artist--a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s in education. His art proves you don’t need formal training to be good. No one who sees it will be surprised to learn Osorio has also served as a social worker.

“Badge of Honor” is a life-size installation consisting of two abutted rooms. One is a prison cell. Starkly austere with its built-in cot, sink and toilet, there is little in it to suggest occupancy except a pair of running shoes and a few family album-style photographs. A center wall divides it from a space that is clearly a teenage boy’s bedroom.

Inside the boy’s room, there is the usual clutter--kung fu and basketball posters, a bike and a boombox. The bike is new and looks expensive. In addition to the music player, there’s a TV and seven pairs of fashionable Nike-style footgear.

In its way, the decor is downright opulent, even luxurious. A billowing quilt in white satin with a pattern of red roses drapes across the bed trailing on a mirrored floor. The mattress box is lined with clenched gold-gilded fists. (Rings that festoon their fingers are actually car air-fresheners.) The rear wall is completely papered with baseball cards.

Despite the consumer goods, the environment doesn’t feel store-bought. It’s a kind of filigreed folk-baroque interior that positively drips familial love. It is at once poetic, surreal, completely convincing of reality and rich with implied narrative.

Yet, instead of allowing his audience to dwell on literary intimations--such as evocations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realism--the artist gets right to work letting us know there is something badly awry in the boy’s magic kingdom.

Before viewers really have time to take in the rooms, their attention is compelled by a repeated 22-minute conversation between two oversize talking male heads projected in black and white on the side walls of each room. The faces are turned toward each other, but are separated by the center divider. On the prison side, the speaker appears to be a Latino male in his early 30s, although he looks older when you see that his front teeth are missing. The boy in the bedroom looks to be about 15. There is a light down of hair on his upper lip. Family resemblance--and relationship--is unmistakable.

Their conversation--carried on in formal, almost courtly accents--consists mainly of questions. The father asks if the boy loves him even though the father hasn’t been a good parent. The son replies he’d gladly give up all his gear and nice things just to have his old man home.

An allusion by Dad to “drinking and fighting” is the only clue given to his detention. There’s a poster of a young boxer in the boy’s room that resembles the prisoner. When Dad warns his boy to stay away from a violent neighborhood pal, the kid defends his friend as “cool.” The chum clearly reminds both of Dad.

Another question leads to the third, but absent, principal in this drama, Mom. Both father and son adore her and credit her as the strong and saintly center holding the family together against intolerable odds. Both would give her their “Badge of Honor.”

Osorio’s piece does several remarkable things. Made as a kind of community outreach exercise in 1995 under the aegis of New Jersey’s Newark Museum, it was first shown in an old storefront in a Newark working-class district that’s predominantly Latino and African American. Its audience were regular folks who just wandered in. Many reportedly were moved to tears.

The work is an authentic documentary. Osorio enlisted the collaboration of New Jersey’s penal system to find a real prisoner and his son. They are identified only as Nelson Sr. and Nelson Jr. Yet while the video drama rings with authenticity and timeliness, the environment Osorio has placed it in elevates it to a work of art that addresses universal questions about who wins when the power of individual love confronts the impersonality of the system. He manages this without rancor or cant.

For an art audience, the piece is enriched with echoes of Edward Kienholz and intimations of today’s Baroque theme-park world, where the privileged prefer to live in illusion.

* Otis College of Art and Design, 9045 Lincoln Blvd.; through Sept. 6, closed Sundays-Mondays, (310) 665-6905.