Luxury Waters was a mixed media installation from artist Pat Falco in collaboration with Robin Banks and Tory Bullock. The artist transormed the gallery into a satirical retail sales office of a 62 story luxury triple decker in the flood plains of the tech cluster know as the "innovation district". Read more about the exhibition on The Artery, Big Red and Shiny, and Universal Hub.

Installation documentation

Exterior of Luxury Waters installation, 2017 Interior of Luxury Waters installation, 2017 Print of the fictional Luxury Waters builting, 2017

Explore more material from the exhibition on the artist's review page for the exhibition.

Press Statement

OPEN Gallery is pleased to host Pat Falco's Luxury Waters, the artist’s second retail intervention in Boston. Known for political satire and a folk Boston aesthetic, Falco brings his critique to housing justice with a collection of plans, processes, research material, and marketing objects for a 62-story luxury triple-decker rising from the Fort Point Channel waters in Boston’s Innovation District.

As Tech commodifies labor at an increasing rate, automating the segregation of rich and poor and concentrating wealth in our cities, the way we build and regulate housing matters. Luxury Waters questions who gets to live in our cities of wealth.

For this exhibition, Falco has developed a series of works which juxtapose the abundance of “market rate” housing against the social injustices on which it is built. Falco’s drawings, sculpture, and installations tell the story of a design process forged in the image of a society obsessed with deregulation, automation, and unhinged growth.

Luxury Waters recontextualizes the processes of luxury housing production into a cartoon space that speculates on the outcomes of real estate development ideology. The appropriation of working class design, the construction of housing at sea level without consideration of climate change, the isolationism of tech housing on commuter corridors, and the blatant manipulation of inclusionary housing regulations, all point to the bleak conclusion that Falco considers in this installation.

By separating the language of development from any specific building, Falco creates a rhetorical space for reflection that challenges the narratives embedded in our built environment. This interruption of the future cities discourse shines a light on the invisible hand of housing development.

Pat Falco (b. 1987) received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Falco's work has been shown at The Luggage Store Gallery (SF), New Image Art (LA), SPACE GALLERY (Portland ME), Grin (Providence), New Bedford Art Museum and Decordova Biennial. Falco is a working artist living in Boston, MA.