Man and nature collide in Vermont contemporary gallery group show featuring Charlotte Potter

The complex relationship between the human and the natural worlds is rich territory for an art gallery set in the town of Waitsfield, Vermont, with its long history of forestry and agriculture. Through mid-October, art dealer Stephanie Walker has turned over her Walker Contemporary gallery space to an exhibition entitled “What Have We Done?”, which examines artists “grappling with the often precarious human versus nature relationship,” according to the gallery’s website. Among the five artists with work on display is the native-born Charlotte Potter, who grew up in Waitsfield before embarking on a notable career as a multi-media artist with a focus on glass. Holding a 2010 MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Potter is currently the studio manager/program director of the Chrysler Museum of Art’s Glass Studio, in Norfolk, Virginia, and her evolving artwork is represented by New York City's Heller Gallery. Potter's glass deer and elk antlers have actually been incubating in the artist’s mind and studio practice since 2008, and are recontextualized by showcasing them alongside paintings and drawings in which, as the gallery puts it, humans’ “meddling interference in the natural order of things…takes center stage”

The glass antlers began back when Potter was a “starving artist” in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as she told the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet in a telephone interview. “[Jackson Hole] has these big antler arches when you walk into town,” she said, “and all the art galleries — you can’t throw a stick, essentially, without hitting a cowboy or an Indian, or a set of antlers.” In this setting, Potter ran into a confounding question that spurred her creative impulses. “While I was waiting tables, a tourist asked me this question: do you know what elevation the deer turn to elk? And I was just like, ‘oh man, I’ve gotten a lot of weird questions but I have never gotten something like that.’”

She began to use this biological confusion as a vehicle through which she could parody the “antler-art culture” of the American West. “I would go to taxidermy companies and purchase the foam heads that the skin would be pulled over. And then I would hand-sculpt the antlers and attach them to these heads,” resulting in “hybridized, half-deer half-elk beings.” Over time, this practice became more and more of a biological pastiche. “I would end up having goat eyes with a fox ear on an antelope head with elk horns,” Potter said. She was encouraged to leave this series behind once entering graduate school, but continued to hone her antler technique “in the background, quietly,” for years.

Cut to 2016, and Potter’s antler’s have come full circle, with the opportunity to be exhibited at a gallery in her hometown, which is evolving into a resort town that fosters innovation. Though Potter originally thought of the antlers in their Western context as “playful” and “tongue-in-cheek,” they look quite different when surrounded by works wrestling with human influence upon the environment. “I’m thrilled to see the way [Walker Contemporary owner, Stephanie Walker] put together this show,” said Potter. “It’s really thoughtful. The way she writes about the work — like ‘what have we done’ — was a very different approach than what I was thinking about when I was creating the work… and there’s totally legitimacy to the perspective that she’s posing with the work.”

Earnest or ironic, the combination of distinct species raises interesting questions about the boundary of identities and “the allure of fusion,” as Potter puts it. These concerns and their literal representations are seen throughout the artist’s overall body of work. “This notion of taking something absurd like that [inciting question] and then following through to its most illogical conclusions is something I do a lot in my practice,” Potter said “whether it’s deciding I need to map my entire body out of glass microscope slides, or I need to categorize every single one of my friends on Facebook by the memorialization of a glass cameo. I think this was the beginning of me asking absurdist questions and then following them to their imperative status.”

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