Jesse Potts: Hot Dust

The sculptures, prints, and installations in this show are a collection of new works that explore the intersection of place, memory and time. These works 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 I question 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. What attracts me to the road is not only its symbolic reference to mobility and to the line between two points but also its coded system of rules. I like thinking about the rules of the road and the binaries and paradoxes therein. 

For example, if I stand in the middle of the road with one foot straddled on either side of the double yellow line and if I adhere to the rules of the road, I am stuck, stagnant. I can neither go forward nor backward. Now, if I look down closely at the double yellow line between my feet I might consider the space between the two yellow lines. What is this interstitial space in-between the between? It is no-man’s land. It is neither coming nor going; neither northbound nor southbound. It is simply bound.

These musings and others are at play in the ways the works in this exhibition have been conceived, and constructed in the studio and assembled and installed within the gallery. Some works contain momentum, some works are the residue of momentum and some remain lost in between.

-Jesse Potts