Looking Back, Moving Forward: Reflecting on the anne drew potter Exhibition

About the Artist

Despite a dim awareness of our own subjectivity, the individual reality that belongs to each of us is experienced as concrete and self-evident. I am interested in the moment when the self-evidence of our own experiences is challenged by confrontation with the other, the infinity of realities that exist outside of our own.

I attempt to make performative objects that address the ways in which social meaning is projected onto the forms of the body. I manipulate anatomical signifiers of gender, race, age, and other identity characteristics to encourage viewers to confront their feelings about normalcy, difference, and what defines human. By creating a tension between the intellectual reality of the static object and the emotional drama of exaggerated expressions I hope to imply the self-consciousness and artifice that are present both in formal theatre/cinema and in our everyday projections of our selves.

My work bridges contemporary conceptual and narrative concerns with certain elements of sculptural tradition to question both our current constructions of identity as they relate to the body and the manner in which these are connected to a historically informed sense of self.

– anne drew potter