September 26, 2022

The new exhibit at the Brandywine River Museum of Art is as much about the environment as it is about art. The exhibit is Fragile Earth: The Naturalist Impulse in Contemporary Art and features the work of four artists working with environmental themes.

As BRM Senior Curator Amanda Burdan said, “We think this is such an important exhibition to showcase the two halves of our house, the fine art and our environmental house, our concerns about preserving the environment.”

Artists featured in the exhibit are Courtney Mattison, Mark Dion, James Prosek, and Jennifer Angus. According to guest curator Jennifer Parsons, the associate curator at the Florence Griswold Museum of Art in Old Lyme, Conn., all four are “commenting and reacting to their inspiration in the natural world.”

Parsons continued, saying the works speak of both the beauty and the fragility of the natural world, and each artist is inspired by history and fantasy, “especially the historic tradition of the 18^th and 19^th centuries when artists were interested in the scientific aspect of categorizing nature.”

Courtney Mattison has degrees in environmental science and ceramic sculpture and is a past artist-in-residence at the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Calif. Her clay sculptures of coral reefs jut out from the walls of the third-floor gallery.

Sharing space in that gallery are the works of James Prosek and Mark Dion. One of Dion’s pieces is also a sculpture. It’s called Blood Red Coral. Various human artifacts, small items — a whistle, a bell, a pocketknife — trinkets hang from the branches of the piece. The intent is to bring attention to what man is doing to the oceans, something he calls “oceanocide.”

Prosek’s work includes a mural outside the gallery, one he did for the exhibit. It features silhouettes of flora and fauna found in the area but without any key telling the viewer what those plants and creatures are.

Parsons said that reflects how the animals don’t know the names people call them, nor do they understand the boundaries humans have placed on the animals’ natural environment and habitat.

Jennifer Angus has a second-floor gallery all to her own for Fragile Earth. It’s a large insect collection. Angus is a professor of design at the University of Wisconsin and a bug artist. According to Parsons, Angus has combined her love of science with her love of the environment.

Angus also incorporated a wallpaper design that Andy Wyeth had used in the children’s bedroom at his studio,

The exhibit had been planned since 2019, Burdan said but was delayed because of COVID two years ago and last year’s Sept. 1 flood. Fragile Earth runs through Jan. 8.