Carter Potter - Spacers
Julie Saul Gallery, New York
April 26 - June 2, 2001
The Julie Saul Gallery presents a solo exhibition of "Film Paintings" by Los Angeles based artist Carter Potter. For nearly ten years UCLA-trained Carter Potter has been using film-stock as the medium from which he constructs "Paintings"- in which he stretches the "leaders, feet and spacers" from discarded film around stretchers in horizontal rows, which when assembled read as translucent minimalist canvases. Carter Potter has always worked with found sculptural materials- from thrift store paintings to abandoned sofas- and as if responding to Marcel Duchamp’s abandonment of painting for the "assisted ready made" in 1913, he has transformed the objet trouvé back into painting. It is appropriate and ironic that Carter Potter has chosen the "primary medium" of his native hometown- the detritus of the end-product.
Carter Potter’s film paintings have subtly evolved over the last decade- a transition that can be discussed with a vocabulary similar to that used to describe minimalist painting- from densely woven strips of 16 and 35mm stock to his current use 70mm IMAX material. Michael Duncan wrote in Art in America that these paintings "slyly recall ... the Zen-like conceptual landscapes of Agnes Martin (while) using cinema’s throwaway bits and pieces to transcend the medium’s own frenetic expostulatory nature." The milky translucent spacers are interspersed with bands of rich and delicately colored foots and ends which also contain images of marks, numbers, and sometimes even images and text relating to the film from which they were plucked- thus providing the titles such as "The Greatest Story Ever Told (reel 3 roll A)" . In this exhibition two six-foot and two four-foot works (he always works in a square format) are "face off" within the symetrical space of the gallery.
Carter Potter’s work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Panza Collection and the collection of Eileen and Peter Norton, Santa Monica. He has had solo exhibitions at the Rocket Gallery, London, Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, and Howard Yezerski in Boston and has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the 44th Biennial at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.
JULIE SAUL GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011