An architect, painter and sculptor all enter the Hartnett Gallery. One wonders how they consolidated their individual skills, only to find that they are all the same person: Chicago-based artist Brian Petrone.

Petrone’s new exhibition, “Sites and Non-sites,” is Hartnett Gallery’s first exhibition by professional artists this semester and presents a multimodal fusion that takes on an almost timeless quality. He superimposes maps on paintings, wood on canvas and the past on the present. The exhibit opened last Thursday after a brief conversation at Morey Hall with Petrone, faculty and students.

The collection is named after the writings of the eminent Earth artist Robert Smithson, who define “non-site” as a metaphorical representation of a physical place (or “site”) that is transferred to a museum or site. gallery. Petrone explained at the conference how his work utilizes skills and techniques typically specific to architecture, painting, and sculpture, respectively. He also explained how his stint in architectural firms helped him learn to circumvent the once limiting rules of architecture; by “forming mass, sculpting space and manipulating light” he discovered how to allow seemingly different disciplines to form and inform each other. In the process, he acquired an agency which allows him to create freely.

Among the exhibits on display, Petrone’s – and mine – favorite is “Urban Experiment 01”, which portrays his fascination with the idea that cities are like living organisms, constantly growing and changing. The piece, which reminds me of Taylor Swift’s pop anthem “Welcome to New York” (“like all great love, it makes you guess / like all true love, it constantly changes”), is constructed of chipboard and linden. Laying out on a flat surface like uninhibited crystal growth designed in a lab, it looks both like a city and an organic entity under a microscope.

While this and other artwork adorns the walls, if you walk into the Hartnett Gallery this month, the first thing you’ll see is the massive white structure in the middle of the room. Petrone opened his speech by showing the public this installation: a model of the glacier that once stretched over Rochester. Walking the audience through the history of the country, he explained its evolution from a particularly attractive hunting trail to the city we know (and maybe even love), and how the pressure exerted by this cap Three-kilometer-thick glacial has shaped the landscape over the millennia.

This in situ installation represents how “the natural rhythms of the earth, although slow and sometimes not very obvious, impact the way we live today,” according to Petrone. His interest in the relationship between the natural forces that shape the earth and the lives of its people is also closely linked to his passion for climate action. Petrone believes the climate crisis is “something we have to face,” for which artists have a particularly powerful platform to raise awareness. So the glacier, which may seem high but relatively indescribable at first glance, actually represents what we stand to lose in the face of global warming.
Petrone cited the Earth Art movement of the 60s and 70s as a major influence on his work. The movement focused on exploring our relationship with the environment, rejecting the commodification of art and reconnecting with the artistic dynamic behind ancient structures such as European and African henges and the Nazca lines in Peru. Among many other great works, Petrone mentioned Alan Sonfist’s “Time Landscape” – an “oasis” of a pre-colonial forest in the middle of New York City – as another example of earth art that has the potential to redefine the way we think about our relationship with the planet.

While Petrone aspires to one day create environmental sculptures of a similar scale, his public sculpture for Dubuque, Iowa’s “Art on the River” program comes close. Entitled “Resiliency Flows,” the installation contains approximately 12,000 bamboo poles of varying heights to create a scale model of the Mississippi. Petrone said he wanted the sculpture to symbolize the importance of individual actions that could lead to “greater consequences downstream.” Considered from an ecological point of view, the installation can be interpreted as a comment on the negative impacts that upstream actions could have downstream on vulnerable river systems. However, for the artist, the work also represents a lesson that he believes must be learned from the pandemic: the importance of collective action for the greater good.

Petrone’s work, which is rooted in the present but is inextricably linked to what once was, expands Sonfist’s thesis to not only commemorate the past but be in constant conversation with it. “Sites and non-sites” encourages the public to rethink how we perceive and interact with the earth we live on and off, and thus to pay more attention to its growth, death and rebirth. . Petrone’s figurative excavation of specific sites to uncover their history and create art is almost archaeological and testifies to the pressure that art can exert on the spaces (physical and abstract) in which it exists.
“Brian Petrone: Sites and Non-sites” is on display in the Hartnett Gallery until October 23.