Pietro Landi Gallery show will feature works by Pete Landis, Banksy, Shepard Fairey
By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
BRIDGEWATER — The son of two celebrated Upper Valley arts educators who grew up in Hartland has joined the growing community of artists and craftspeople enlivening the second floor of the historic Bridgewater Mill.
Pete Landis, a year 2000 graduate of WUHS who spent the last 20 years as a practicing residential architect in New York and Rhode Island, returned to the region with his family last year and in February opened the Pete Landis Studio at the sprawling former textile mill on Route 4 alongside the Ottauquechee River at the gateway to Bridgewater Center.
This weekend, Landis will take his next step as an artist, collector, and curator when he opens the pseudonymously named Pietro Landi Gallery adjacent to his studio at the mill. The first show in the region’s newest contemporary art gallery will feature Landis’ own energetic collages, as well as works by renowned street artist Banksy and Shepard Fairey, the acclaimed creator of the iconic Barack Obama “Hope” poster from 2008.
“I want to show my own work in the gallery,” Landis said on Monday as he led a visitor on a tour of his studio and offered a sneak peek at the inaugural gallery exhibit that will open with a special reception this Saturday evening. “This is the kind of work I started during the pandemic. It’s collage work and it looks back to some of my previous work when I was working more sculpturally. I was taking pre-existing things, found objects and such, and putting them together in a kind of collage approach, although I was working with them three-dimensionally.
“The gallery won’t focus just on my art, however,” Landis continued. “The opening exhibit will include pieces by some friends of mine from my college days and works from the New York street art scene.” Of special note are works by Fairey that are a visual shout-out to the earlier Pop Art works of Andy Warhol and a poster by Banksy, promoting one of the ephemeral, guerrilla street artist’s infrequent gallery exhibits about a decade ago.
Landis’ emerging “Cyborg” series of collage works are, however, the centerpiece of the inaugural exhibit in the Pietro Landi Gallery. One wall of the gallery is dominated by more than 20 small, prototype collage works that will eventually be transformed to a larger format when art collectors purchase them. Landis spoke about his process as he stood before one of the larger-scale works in the upcoming exhibit.
“This is the way I intend to have my work shown. The smaller works on the wall there are mock-ups,” Landis explained. “This larger-scale work is a dye transfer onto an aluminum sheet. It has a flush frame, but I want people to see this thin edge, which is a kind of callback to the magazine page,” he continued, referencing the fact that virtually all the collages in the “Cyborg” series have as their base images photographs clipped from the pages of high-fashion magazines collected by Landis’ wife, Megan, an interior designer with Sargent Design Company in Norwich.
Landis is captivated by images and how they are manipulated to create a kind of alternative reality in popular culture and media. “What I want to do is this push and pull between analog and digital,” the artist noted. “So even though this is just a photograph of an analog collage, you can’t quite tell that it was all done by hand. The initial connection that started this series during COVID is that I was on Instagram and I started to notice all these filters that you could use to change your face,” Landis added. “All these funny things started popping up. It was like adding makeup, but also changing the shape of your face, adding different ears and things like that. And I saw a direct parallel to the fashion magazines and how much photoshopping and editing those models go through. There’s this connection between the instant gratification of putting makeup on digitally versus all the manipulation that happens in a magazine after a photoshoot. These images are presented as being of real people, when actually they are highly sculpted through the staging, the lighting, the clothing, and then all the digital manipulation that happens afterward. They are not real people.”
Harkening back to two of his earlier influences — Fairey and his Pop Art progenitor Warhol — Landis said, “There’s this whole phenomenology of Fairey putting up his stickers and wheat paste posters all over the city and calling your attention to the advertisements that are everywhere, making you much more aware of yourself and your surroundings.” The Upper Valley collagist called further attention to Warhol’s influence on Fairey, especially via the pioneering pop artist’s well-known series of Campbell’s Soup can paintings.
Landis credits the influence of his artistic parents, his pursuit of photography and painting classes at WUHS in the late 1990s, and his studies in architecture at Cornell University with inspiring him creatively. Pete’s father is Marv Klassen-Landis, a well-known Vermont poet and photographer who continues to be a sought-after arts educator, particularly with elementary schools in the region. Marv is also the former arts coordinator at Pentangle in Woodstock. Bess Klassen-Landis, Pete’s mother, was a longtime art teacher at Woodstock Elementary School and an art therapist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. And Pete Landis shares his artistic spirit and inspirations with his wife, the former Megan Niemczyk, a fellow WUHS graduate whom he met by pure coincidence through architectural circles in Brooklyn. The two have two children — Lukas, five and a half, and Caleb, nearly two, with whom they relocated to Vermont from Portsmouth when Megan began working with architect and interior designer Ann Sargent last year. For his part, Pete continues to work remotely as a residential architect with a firm in Little Compton, R.I. while also getting his studio and gallery in Bridgewater up and running.
Visitors to the new Pietro Landi Gallery in Bridgewater can look forward to several revolving exhibits in the coming months. “I haven’t quite figured it all out yet,” Landis concluded Monday afternoon. “But I’ve been talking with some local artists and with friends from the city to try to get a schedule going for the rest of the summer. I’d like to have at least two more exhibit openings this summer and then see where we go from there. I’m just getting the ball rolling.”