Carter Potter: Couch Triptych 1990-2024
September 7 – October 12, 2024
Opening reception: September 7, 2:00pm to 5:00pm
We are pleased to announce “Carter Potter: Couch Triptych 1990-2024,” a re-staging of one of this artist’s iconic artworks from the decade of the 1990s. “Couch Triptych” is presented in conjunction with “Katy Crowe: Lunar Shift.” Both exhibitions open on Saturday, September 7 and continue through October 12 at as-is.la
It is argued that “the dialectic of order and chaos” structures all poetic expression; sometimes tilted toward order, other times toward chaos, but always held together in a tense balance. If so, there can be few more reliable symbols of order (understood here as “domestic tranquility”) than the standard American upholstered couch, and few symbols of chaos more familiar (at least in the art context) than the rivulets and pools of splashed and poured paint associated with Abstract Expressionism.
Starting around 1990, the young Los Angeles artist Carter Potter brought together these two metaphor-loaded elements in a body of artworks hovering between sculpture and painting and perhaps something else. These artworks begin as couches which the artist strips down to partially expose their frames and then (sometimes) saturates with gallons of multi-colored house paint. All to powerful effect.
In the rapidly evolving art scene of the nineties, Potter’s couch artworks were presented in a number of fashionable (if now insufficiently remembered) Los Angeles art venues including the Sue Spaid, Burnett Miller and Angles galleries. And while Potter has gone on to produce the body of somewhat different but equally accomplished work for which he is known, it may be these early artworks that most urgently demand attention.
Indeed, the full measure of their meaning may only be available to us now, as the ubiquitous encampments of the unhoused on our sidewalks, with their similarly aesthetic displays of discarded furniture, arranged and re-arranged, provide a present-day context that could scarcely be imagined some thirty four years ago when Potter’s project began. In light of this new evidence, “Carter Potter: Couch Triptych 1990-2024” is respectfully submitted for re-evaluation.
