Carter Potter at Numark

As a medium firmly entrenched in contemporary art, film can be time-scrambled by Douglas Gordon, metro-sexed by Matthew Barney, or stilled to compelling enigma by John Baldessari. Carter Potter has another approach. A hometown movieland boy from L.A., he makes found-film art objects, which he calls "film paintings," by affixing filmstrips to form a picture surface across stretcher bars, usually in neat, square configurations. The 11 new works in Potter's first solo show in Washington, D.C., provided an update on his project.

Four big pieces measuring nearly 6 feet square, and others much smaller, reveal multiple horizontal bands of color-negative IMAX film, an evolution from the artist's earlier pieces composed of 16- and 35mm film. Uniform strips, approximately 3 inches wide, are affixed right side up and then upside down, in alternating rows; sprockets with tiny typography and cancellation lines (the industry's guarantee against pirated screenings) add to the clean, minimalist horizontality.

Potter scavenges film rejects; his mind-set seems to hover somewhere between film editor and collagist. In the large, Disney-animation-based We Cure Everything #4 (Zebra), the frames move, Muybridge-like, from flying birds, clustered zebras and human figures to sunsets and forests. There's no narrative here, but does it matter? His We Cure Everything (Underwater Garden) depicts slow-moving organisms in a blue-green environment so perfectly contained by the 14-by-14-inch stretcher-bar plane that you might think you're actually looking into a small aquarium. Much of the imagery within single works (an elephant in an indistinct landscape, pyramid edges at sunset, dark violet strips with an indistinguishable subject) is semiabstract with a Warholian edge. Other painterly associations include the precise linearity of Agnes Martin and the canvases of Washington's own obsessive abstractionists Andrea Way and Robin Rose.

Potter uses a simple but clearly toiled-over artistic formula to wrest us into considering his material and imagery anew. I have a few quibbles about the results, including the distracting visibility of stretcher bars in the lighter-hued works; his materials also raise conservation issues--they are unusually susceptible to dust, fingerprints and other types of damage. Even so, his pieces are original and visually compelling; all in all, he does a masterful job.--Sidney Lawrence

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group