KRISTINE POTTER 
MANIFEST
October 8-29, 2022
opening: Friday, October 7 from 7pm

Workshop: ‘Reimagining Narratives II’ October 8-9
info and subscriptions: [email protected]  

Potter’s poetic use of the figure in the landscape allows us to consider how the wilderness shapes our perception of masculinity in the west
–  Ron Jude

Micamera presents Manifest by Kristine Potter. The perfectly printed black and white photographs were created while working in remote areas along the Western slope of Colorado between 2012 and 2015. They invite us into the social worlds of deep America — the expansive West — as the author decodes, reframes, and recodes their conventional meanings. Cliches of masculinity dissolve into idyllic reflection. Bold male archetypes of the wild west soften into vulnerability and uncertainty. 

Potter is keenly attuned to how her subjects navigate and negate the archetypes and cliches of their cultures, and how photography has reinforced and distorted them in the popular imagination. In Potter’s portraits we glimpse individuals shaped, burdened, and empowered by the weight of their culture’s history, but sometimes the natural landscape itself becomes the main subject — not simply a backdrop or a stage but a numinous and self-contained archetype of itself.

Manifest is part of ‘But Still, It Turns’, exhibition curated by Paul Graham, shown at ICP in New York City and at Rencontres d’Arles (catalogue published by MACK in 2021).

Manifest is also Kristine Potter’s beautiful first monograph, released by TBW Books in 2018 and now rare. Few copies will be available at the bookshop. 

The exhibition at Micamera has been produced by the Rencontres d’Arles 

Kristine Potter (1977) is an artist based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work explores masculine archetypes, the American landscape, and cultural tendencies toward mythologizing the past.  Potter was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and the Grand Prix Image Vevey, where her most recent work Dark Waters was exhibited in 2020. The book will be released by Aperture in 2023. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including that of: The Georgia Museum of Art, 601 Artspace, Swiss Camera Museum, and Foundation Vevey.
She is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Middle Tennessee State University.