bio

About the Artist

At what age did you know that you had a talent as an artist?
When I was about ten, I had to create something to depict a craft of native american culture for a class project. I think that was the defining moment as an artist. My father was an accountant type by trade, non-college educated, he worked at Penn State University dealing with tuition issues, but his hobbies (which consumed his free time) were woodworking, photography, outdoorsman skills, learning "useless" trivia, and he always had an interest in finding out "how and why things work." So when I got the assignment, I told my family that I wanted to make a totem pole. It was magical. My father and I went down into the basement workroom, we began scavenging for things that we could co-mingle to make our totem pole. Merging his ideas with mine, using drills and glue and crayons and plastic toy indians, balsa wood and whatever else we could find, we reached our goal. When we stood back and saw what we had done, my mind just popped. It was such a feeling of independence, pride and on some levels, power. To take an idea, mere chemical firings in your brain, and bring physical elements together to create an item that expresses, teaches, educates....it's powerful. That was the experience that first made me realize the power of creating.

So it sounds like your father was a big influence?
He certainly was, but my mother was as well. She painted ceramics and created miniature candle illuminated dioramas out of Pringle potato chip canisters. They were kitschy and amusing. The biggest influence they had on me artistically was actually through their departure from this world. My father died in 1993 and my mother just over 3 years later. During that time I really began thinking about what living is really about, and became very clear to me that life to me is about love and joy and beauty and following your dreams and enjoying every moment that we have as life. And I think art is what life is all about - art makes you sit back and really look at the world. It's then up to you to respond and interact with it in a way that makes you and others around you feel good. It may sound a bit corny, but I feel it's true.

Tell me about the range of your work?
I have a large range or work which I think follows due to my self-proclaimed attention-deficit-hyperactive personality. I have a thirst for information, new experiences and new actions - I'm a "gimme more, gimme more" kinda guy. I am constantly looking at the world around me trying to identify new items and media I can incorporate into my work. I photograph, paint, draw, sculpt, construct and build. I create types of work that are of typical dimension for standard homes and environments and I am commissioned by clients to create work for large spaces. I love working big.

What image types have you been working with?
Over the last six years I've used ancient greek and roman images, male portraiture, sex personal ads, crushed cigarrette cartons, valet tickets, fruit, numbers, vegetables, machine parts, watches, safety pins, architecture, anatomy text drawings, dollar bills, body photography, images gleaned from newspapers

What medium do you feel is your best to work with?
Right now, most of my works begins in the photographic realm. Starting with imagery that I capture, I impart all the other media and materials to reach the end goal. Imagery has recently consisted of roman antiquities (busts and architectural elements), fruits and vegetables, cast-off items found in the streets, and as I mentioned before crushed cigarette cartons, valet tickets, colorful lightbulb cartons, corrougated cardboard shards, and currency.

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Gallery Representation

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Vastu Gallery
1829 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC
www.VastuDC.com
202.234.8344

Gallery Fifty Contemporary Art
50 Wilmington Avenue, Rehoboth Beach, DE
Gallery Owner and Director - Jay Pastore
302.227.2050
www.50contemporaryart.com
jpastore@50comtemporaryart.com

MDH Fine Arts
233 West 19th Street, New York, NY
Gallery Owner and Director - Michael Henry
917.364.8221
www.mdhfinearts.com
michael@mdhfinearts.com

Sande Webster Gallery
2018 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA
Gallery Director - Sande Webster
215.732.8850

Works on Paper Gallery
1611 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
Gallery Director - Evan Slepian
215.988.9999

D.O.C.S. Gallery
709 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA
www.docsgallery.com
Gallery Director - Richard Nesbitt
504.524.3936

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Clients

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Absolut Vodka
Commissioned by Absolut Vodka to create advertisement artwork to be used in magazine, newspaper, poster, billboard, banner, and other unlimited uses. Absolut has the right to use artwork in perpetuity. Other Absolut commissioned artists include Andy Warhol, Damian Hirst, Roberto Clemento, Romero Britto and others.

Ritz-Carlton Hotels (view work)
Washington, DC
Commissioned to do work for the menus, lobby and restaurant.

Universal Gear (view work)
Fashion photography - shot on location in Rio de Janiero, Brazil (page captures from site and still photography images)

Library of Congress
Washington, DC
Commissioned to design pamphlet cover

Aviance Marketing (view work)
Commissioned to create covers for local business directories.

American Institute for Cancer Research
Washington, DC
Commissioned to create cover for publication

Steptoe & Johnson
Washington, DC
Collection of 16 original polymer transfer works

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Art Historian View

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Post-modern theory was born in the late 1960s with the call for the �death� of the author. Instead of looking to the artist�s biography as the inner, hidden or true meaning of a work of art, theorists argued that a viewer always recreates a work through his or her own perceptual filters. (Roland Barthes, �The Death of the Author,� 1968) A work then has an almost infinite possibility of meanings, rather than a single, correct one.

Yet ironically post-modern practice reveals that the author very much returns and is reborn in the work. Coincidentally, one of the most provocative exponents of this return is an �author� who himself was born in the late 1960s: Brian Petro.

Brian Petro�s works are haunted by the ghosts of their displaced authors. The scraps, photographs, pages and objects that Petro stores in his bag of appropriative tricks bear the traces of the anonymous makers who once created them. But like the deus-ex-machina of classical drama arriving in the final act to turn events around, Petro�s appropriations and re-combinations stamp his images with the mark of his subjectivity, adding another layer to the possibilities of meaning. Who speaks in these works? The objects themselves? The voice of the artist? Or our own desires, as we recognize earlier stories and tell ourselves new ones?

Petro plays games with what an object is and what it means. By re-using found imagery in unexpected combinations, he forces us to rethink the way we view an image. What kind of story does a Classical sculptural bust tell, once it nestles next to an illustration of a coal separator and a page from a 19th century medical textbook? When Petro scans odds-and-ends onto a blow-up photographic placard that once advertised clothing, is the model de-faced or re-faced?

If meaning is not simple in Petro�s work, neither is making. He utilizes reproductive techniques that attack the sanctity of the object. When combined with his recycling of imagery, his works seem like multiples. Yet each piece is a distinct monoprint, creating a tension between process and product. Petro�s works thus deconstruct the binary oppositions between old/new, process/product, and unique/multiple.

In a world of loss, Petro�s works offer hope. Science tells us that energy can never be created nor destroyed, only changed. Brian Petro suggests that art does the same thing. It is a possibility that glimmers in the trail of Petro�s markings over the surface of his lustrous recent black monoprints and winks at us cheekily from the personal ads that form the �backpacking� of his early Mylar portrait-boxes. If his work is a ghost story, full of �dead� authors who continually return, we as both viewers and authors of our own and Petro�s texts both haunt and are haunted, as well.

Authored by William Rudolph
Ph.D. candidate in the history of art, Bryn Mawr College
Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts, University of the Arts, Philadelphia