Peter Feigenbaum “Trainset Ghetto: Streetsmart”

09.04.-09.30.2010
Opening: Saturday 09.04.2010 7-10pm

In September 2010, Peter will be showing a new series of large-scale photographs at Open Source Gallery based on a site-specific installation of his “Trainset Ghetto” sets on the street in front of the gallery storefront space. The images will feature increasingly bizarre and phantasmagorical juxtapositions of time, scale, and neighborhood architectural vernaculars, in which his invented, rubble-strewn New York City 70s minature slum landscape collides with the almost-gentrified brownstone environment of south Park Slope.

Trainset Ghetto is voyeurism more than it is hobbyism. It is the physical byproduct of teenage suburban daydreams and attempts to live vicariously through an alien post-urban 1980s landscape that was in no way part of my quotidian existence–a landscape that I caught glimpses of through car rides down the Bruckner Expressway, Henry Chalfant’s graffiti photographs, and movies such as “The French Connection” and “Style Wars”. But this odd juxtaposition of lifestyles is a well-hidden text. I make few overt attempts to exploit this perverse juxtaposition of place and social circumstance in my photographs. Rather, the primary emphasis is always “setting the scene” in a hyper-real, trompe l’oeil manner. Unlike other “scene-setting” photographers like James Cassebere, who works with hazy spatial ambiance, or Gregory Crewdson, who creates uncanny cinematic narratives, Trainset Ghetto is concerned primarily with hyper-realism via an attention to small mundane details of the urban architectural vernacular.

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