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PEDRO REYES ::::
Mexican artist Pedro Reyes takes aim at modernist ideologies, environmental concerns, and community interactions in social space. Trained as an architect, Reyes often employs architectural and design strategies to question the uses of public space and resources. He creates objects that instigate actions: an adjustable mural for Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park or a floating Styrofoam pyramid meeting place for the waters off Puerto Rico. He also infuses installations with conceptual strategies—for a recent exhibition, he calculated and offset the carbon footprint created by shipping his work from Mexico to New York.
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‘Para Por Pistolas, 2007,
still from a documentary video
For this project Pedro Reyes worked with a local Mexican agency to encourage people to hand in their weapons in exchange for food stamps. 1,700 traded guns were made into spades and each spade is to be used to plant a tree. The project was initially conceived for The Botanical Garden in Culiacán, a city in western Mexico with the highest rate of deaths by gun in the country.
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