Fine Art

Tina Potter (American, Born 1950) exploits the double life of photography—as image, and as thing. Overly nearly 50 years she has drawn on the photograph at hand—personal snapshots of New York City in the 1980s, catastrophic photojournalism of Chernobyl, microscopic photos of viruses and bacteria that she montages in service of new and uncanny images. The work suggests a primal artistic fantasy—to be able to take the world as such as the very medium of creation, to take scenes of atrocity and agents of devastation and transmute them into objects of beauty and fascination. It is a dream of mastery for an age of mediated anxiety: as any attentive parent notices, the doll and the drawing are two of the first media through which we stage relating, representing, and mastering the world.

Potter offers a series of experiments, the record of her own half century of sense-making, whose resonances in the age of photographic deception and virality (biological and mediatic), feel more prescient than ever.
Tina Potter’s work has been exhibited and reviewed widely. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian; she was previously represented by White Columns.

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