Why would an artist leave the greatest city in the world? Artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda lives out his own personal Escape from New York​ (1981)—the John Carpenter classic cult film—completing a big mission before time runs out. ​From his Hunter College MFA studio in Tribeca, Almanza Pereda recalls how the retro-future action film had a big impact on him as a kid growing up in Mexico. Set in a dystopian Manhattan that’s been turned into a prison, the film features anti-hero character Snake Plissken whose mission is to rescue the President before the time lapse bomb implanted in Plissken’s body explodes. Almanza Pereda sees today’s New York City as an inaccessible prison of a different sort: “It’s become a playground for really privileged people.” Almanza Pereda describes the disheartening, socially isolating environment that artists in New York now face.

With exorbitant rents for barely adequate studio spaces, artists are forced to maximize their time by either making money or art, with little opportunity to partake in the larger creative community that attracted them to the city in the first place. But like any good New Yorker, Almanza Pereda optimizes his best remaining asset—the three weeks that remain in his Hunter studio—and embarks on an ambitious new project before moving to Mexico City. He creates a DIY plywood aquarium in which he photographs classic table-top still lifes featuring his own treasured knickknacks and produce sourced from nearby Chinatown. Staging his arrangements upside down and underwater, Almanza Pereda is able to circumvent the rules of gravity in favor of a alternative world where objects counterintuitively float and sink. At times melancholy, sublime, and unpredictable, Almanza Pereda’s still lifes mirror his own bittersweet feelings about leaving New York: sadness over the loss of friends leavened with the promise of adventures in a new city.