Pepon Osorio is a sculptor and installation artist of Puerto Rican descent that creates artwork which are testimonial to his life. Osorio’s parents discouraged him from pursuing a formal education in the arts because “being an artist is not going to do it.” As a result, Osorio majored in sociology and became a social worker in New York City in which he constantly connected with the community around him. Although being a social worker was not his true calling, what he did as an artist was not so different from his social work. “As a social worker, going and visiting homes, moving from here and there, realizing that the impact was very similar in many different ways. Obviously, the art has a much greater extent of interpretation, and I wasn’t …show more content…
Looking at the installation, my eyes are immediately drawn to crime scene in the middle of this apartment and after I start to analyze the objects around the dead body. Osorio overwhelms the viewer with found objects meticulously placed all over to create a narrative. A person’s body lies underneath a bloodstained sheet with what appears to be broken china all over the floor. One can assume a violent act took place but Osorio leaves it to the viewer to put the puzzle pieces together. Osorio through this installation criticizes how society views his culture and which tries to disrupt the stereotypes present in the people viewing the artwork. Since I am a second generation latino american, I instantly understood what was going on in this crime scene. The camera and the lighting are capturing dead body but the many different objects around it. I believe Osorio is trying to show how the media seems to only highlight the crime in latino community but the hardly highlight the culture. Although there is a bloody corpse in the piece, it is surrounded by positive objects such as family photos and