New York, NY, January 20, 2001--- El Museo del Barrio proudly continues its seventh year of the Contemporánea series with Contemporánea 2001: Neighbors - An Installation by Leandro Erlich. Curated by Dr. Julia P. Herzberg, Consulting Curator, Erlich's Neighbors is an architectural installation that questions notions of reality.

Commissioned by El Museo to create this site-specific work, Erlich engages viewers' sensory experiences with this installation. Neighbors recreates an ordinary place from our everyday world and challenges us to interact with and react to a slightly skewed environment. The installation functions like a mysterious set design in which viewers actively participate in the narrative. In a typical apartment building corridor, we expect things to be what they appear to be. Erlich, however, confounds us by interweaving the real and the illusory, paradoxically proving and disproving the adage, "What you see is what you get."

Upon entering the installation, visitors discover a corridor of closed apartment doors and an elevator. Try to open the doors; they are locked. Push the elevator button; the elevator door opens, but the space is unexpected. Walk out of the corridor to the back of the locked doors; look through their peepholes and find surprising views. Erlich teases and toys with our sense of reality, prompting a reappraisal of our perceptions of space and environment.

Leandro Erlich was born in 1973 in Buenos Aires, Argentina and now lives in the New York. His formal studies began with a brief stint at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón in 1991. In the early nineties, he received a grant from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (1992), and a fellowship from the Fundación Antorchas (1994), two prestigious awards that enabled him to develop his early work in sculpture and installation. The Pan American Cultural exchange Foundation in Houston introduced Erlich to the Core Program at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which awarded him a two-year fellowship in 1997.

Erlich has had two solo exhibitions at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires and he participated in the First Mercosur Biennial Art Show in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1997. In 1999, he exhibited Swimming Pool, a large sculptural environment at the annual Core fellowship show; the work was subsequently shown at the Modern Art Museum in Forth Worth. His most recent installation, Rain, was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial 2000. Tourism, a collaborative installation with Judith Werthein, was shown at the Seventh Havana Biennial in November 2000. Neighbors, at El Museo, is his first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

The Contemporáánea series was introduced in 1995. It is based on the belief that contemporary artists deserve a showcase as their works push the boundaries and challenge the conventions of visual arts. Through Contemporáánea, El Museo commissions artists - who have not had a one-person New York City museum exhibition -- to create site-specific, large-scale installations in a spacious gallery at the entrance to El Museo. Each project is accompanied by wall signage and a brochure with an interpretive essay.

This project was generously funded by the Jerome Foundation.

The mission of El Museo del Barrio is to establish a forum that will preserve and project the cultural heritage of Puerto Ricans and all Latin Americans in the United States.

Museum hours: Wed. through Sun. 11 to 5 p.m. Suggested contribution: $4 adults; $2 students and seniors; children under twelve accompanied by adults and members enter free.

El Museo del Barrio may be reached by subway: #6 to 103rd Street station; or by bus: M1, M3, M4 on Madison and Fifth Avenues to 104th Street; local cross-town service between Yorkville or East Harlem and the Upper West Side in Manhattan M96 and M106 or M2.