Sense of Place, 2013.
About:
‘Sense of Place’, the recent exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, serves as the culmination of a lager project Petros (1972, Asmara, Eritrea) has been working on since 2009.
“To come back to Boston as a working artist was markedly different. I was dealing with a lot of institutions – the school, the museum – that I had had a relation with, but always in the role as a student.” (he has a masters from the school of the Museum of Fine arts)
Sense of Place, 2013.
“When it came down to the work, the challenge was to bring all these experiences that I’ve cultivated through this project to Boston, but not simply replicate the project that I had done iterations of in different parts of the world so that it became formulaic.”
Sense of Place, installation view, 2013.
The exhibition encompasses works based on Petros’s travels to a number of locations over the past few years – Harlem, where the project began in 2009, Osbourne, Kansas, Addis Ababa, Dakar, Sao Paulo, and now Boston.
Single Cube Formation, 2011.
Petros takes ‘walks of discovery’ at each location, charting courses through specific neighborhoods and photographing colored objects he encounters along the way, ranging from doorways to trash bags to traces of graffiti-colored walls. Then, in the studio, he abstracts the photos to generate monochromatic fields of color, which he then uses to create new photographs, sculptures, vinyl wallpaper, and custom latex paint murals – ‘social abstractions’ as he calls them.
Proposition 1, Mountain, 2007.
