Yuri Pattison at LABOR

Artist: Yuri Pattison

Exhibition title: crisis cast

Venue: LABOR, Mexico City, Mexico

Date: June 29 – August 20, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and LABOR, Mexico City

LABOR is pleased to announce the first exhibition of Yuri Pattison in Mexico, crisis cast. Pattison’s work explores the multiple relationships between visual cultures, space, communication technologies and the circulation of information. The artist uses various types of media often juxtaposed or dispersed, as well as data and metadata, along with a mixture of factual materials, archival sources and historical fragments.

Pattison uses digital technology to investigate the political and social ramifications of the rapid development of technology and the depth of visual culture in the Internet age. His physical works take advantage of the space outside the web to explore the notions of open communication and the flexibility of labor borders in the modern workspace. The artist creates complex scenarios to construct narratives with fictitious scripts that lean towards the theory of conspiracy and the Science fiction.

With the revival of nationalist tendencies, the surge of populism but also the propelling of new forms of media-based propaganda and manipulation based on data profiling a kind of manipulation that has to do with architecture and design has been revealed. We can see how these aspects affects us in the way we are directed in airports and the security control that comes with this. All of this can be seen as a way of directing and managing crowds and people. Yuri Pattison´s project crisis cast fits within that spectrum.

The artist’s interest in complex socially construed spaces, with unique sets of rules and behaviors is projected into the crisis cast project. The exhibition is an attempt to make a direct connection between the audience and the viewer as well as the audience and the participants in this work.

For crisis cast the artist collaborated with the film and event production company CrisisCast, who specialize in role play scenarios for crisis management and disaster training for situations designed with clients according to their needs. Pattison contracted CrisisCast to create a hypothetical situation in a complex socially constructed space with a set of rules and behaviors created by the artist. The work points to what Edward Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, has called “security theater”: the measures deployed by airports and other organizations—public and private—to create a sense of security in complying users, visitors, and clients without actually achieving or attempting to achieve any effect.

Yuri Pattison, crisis cast, 2019, exhibition view, LABOR, Mexico City