FARMINGTON — The University of Maine at Farmington kicks off the semester with an exhibit at the UMF Art Gallery by Jesse Potts, sculptor, artist and UMF assistant professor of art.
“Hot Dust” is a collection of sculptures, prints and animated installations on display from Jan. 28 through March 6. The exhibit is free and open to the public.
There will be an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 28.
The works in this exhibit explore the intersection of place, memory and time. They emerged from a meditation on the meaning of “home” and the ways that “home” shifts based on one’s perception of its permanence or transience. In the studio, the artist questions how the memory of an experience is organized through its relationship to a place and time. How might those memories be mutated, overwritten or erased by time?
A re-occurring element in this body of work is the reference to the road either through the use of maps or through the reference to the solid double yellow-line bisecting lanes of traffic. Potts is attracted to the road in not only its symbolic reference to mobility and to the line between two points, but also its coded system of rules. Some works contain momentum, some works are the residue of momentum and some remain lost in between.
Potts’ sculpture and installations combine constructed and found objects, printed image, video, light, performance and sound. Kinetic and interactive components within the work link time-based functions to action and outcome. The work itself exists as the residual matter of a meditation on the relationship between time, sensory perception, culture and mortality.
He has been an artist in residence at the I-A-M residency, Berlin, Germany, The European Ceramic Work Centre’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France. He has received grants from The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Vermont Arts council, The Kansas City Artist Coalition and VCU School of the Arts. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally and reviewed by Hyperallergic and The New York Times.
Potts received his master of fine arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University.
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