Peter’s installation and photography project “Trainset Ghetto” is an urban and architectural mashup inspired by his teenage suburban daydreams of an alien post-urban 1980s landscape, one he caught glimpses of through car rides down the Bruckner Expressway and saw memorialized in Henry Chalfant’s graffiti photographs, and movies such as “The French Connection” and “Style Wars,” but never actually experienced.
The series takes cues from the virtual realms found in 1990s video games ranging from Sim City to Duke Nuke ’Em to Grand Theft Auto. But where other artists have responded to the digital realm of the 1990s using similarly digital means, Trainset Ghetto uses anachronistic, analogue means—the age-old pseudo-craft of model railroading. From a stock of nearly fifty buildings created both from scratch and from model railroad structure kits, Peter composes believable scenes that are almost capable of imparting false memories of a 1970s childhood in the bombed-out Bronx that the artist never lived.
Hours:
Gallery is open Tuesday – Friday, 2-7pm; Saturday, 11am-7pm; or by appointment.
