Vanity in the Digital Age

Name: Vanity in the Digital Age
Item: Alberta Craft Gallery
Author: Galleries West

December 4, 2016

11:15 AM

Anne Drew Potter, "Vanitas," 2015

ceramic, wood, fabric, plastic and metal, installation view

Anne Drew Potter's fascinating ceramic sculptures explore how social meaning is projected onto the human body, how people construct identities and act out roles. The California-born artist manipulates anatomical signifiers of gender, race, age and the like, hoping to prompt viewers to confront their feelings about normalcy, difference and what makes us human. Her work, Vanitas, for instance, on display at the Alberta Craft Council until Dec. 24 as part of a three-person show, Mise en Scene, is a reflection on vanity. “Vanity is the vice of the digital age," Potter notes in a statement about her work. "We contemplate our own image in a narcissistic sea of Facebook self-celebrity, suffering ever more constrainment of the senses. We admire the obscene and unchecked accumulation of wealth, the democratization of purchasing power, authority and ownership – a psychological reality slightly apart from our shared existence.” Recently a visiting instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Potter holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and has lived and worked in Mexico and Germany. Mise en Scene, a French term that refers to the design of theatre and film productions, also features work by two other artists, Triniruth Bautista, a Filipino-Canadian ceramic artist, and E.M. Alysse Bowd, a Red Deer, Alta., artist who recently earned her MFA at NSCAD University in Halifax.