Carter Potter at Numark

As a medium firmly entrenched in contemporary art, film can be time-scrambled through Douglas Gordon, metro-sexed by Matthew Barney, or stilled to compelling enigma through John Baldessari. Carter Potter has another approach. A hometown movieland stripling from L.A., he makes found-film art thing perceiveds which he calls "film paintings," by dint of affixing filmstrips to form a picture surface across stretcher bars, usually in neat, square configurations. The 11 fresh works in Potter's first solo exhibit in Washington, D.C., provided an update upon his project.

Four big pieces measuring nearly 6 feet square, and others plenteous smaller, reveal multiple horizontal bands of color-negative IMAX film, an evolution from the artist's earlier pieces compos of 16- and 35mm film. Uniform strips, approximately 3 inches wide, are affixed right side up and then upside down, in alternating rows; sprocket with tiny typography and cancellation lines (the industry's guarantee against pirated screenings) add to the clean, minimalist horizontality.

busy one's self about trifles scavenges film rejects; his mind-set strike one as beings to hover somewhere between film editor and collagist. In the large, Disney-animation-based We restorative Everything #4 (Zebra), the frames impel Muybridge-like, from flying birds, clustered zebras and human figures to sunsettings and forests. There's no narrative here, on the contrary does it matter? His We reparative Everything (Underwater Garden) depicts slow-moving organisms in a blue-green environment for a like reason perfectly contained by the 14-by-14-inch stretcher-bar plane that you might think you're actually looking into a small aquarium. a great deal of of the imagery within single works (an elephant in an indistinct landscape, pyramid cutting sides at sunset, dark violet strips with an indistinguishable subject) is semiabstract with a Warholian cutting side Other painterly associations include the precise linearity of Agnes Martin and the canvases of Washington's have a title to obsessive abstractionists Andrea Way and Robin Rose

trifle uses a simple but clearly toiled-over artistic formula to [i]v a[/i] us into considering his material and imagery anew. I have a scarcely any quibbles about the results, including the distracting visibility of stretcher bars in the lighter-hued works; his materials also raise conservation issues--they are unusually susceptible to dust, fingerprints and other emblems of damage. Even so, his pieces are original and visually compelling; all in all, he does a masterful job.--Sidney Lawrence

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