Parts & Labor invites you to visit Ada Wright Potter’s open studio, in which she’ll be working on a site-specific installation during the length of her residency.
In the artist’s installations she re-stages the material qualities of photography, using reflective mylar and mirrors to capture and play with light, calling up a filmic process. Wright Potter also employs transparent and translucent materials, like acetate and mylar, to mimic analog film while invoking a feeling of hi-tech ephemerality. Because of the vast quantity of images that we each create, but mostly never print, we generally engage with digital images as an archive of files. The images themselves have become less weighted and hide from us in plain sight. We misunderstand them as insignificant while in fact these files trace real occurrences. Wright Potter’s response is to re-imagine this ephemerality, to make physical the qualities of the photograph. I physically invert the photographic ground to disorient the viewer. The prints are digitally altered, illuminated and flipped on their axis to muddle recognition. In doing so, Wright Potter hopes to create a space we don’t have; a space between material sensation and the theoretical understanding.