The ICA presents the US and Southeastern debut of Kristine Potter’s series, Dark Waters, made between 2015-present, and bringing together 19 of Potter’s gelatin silver photographs in their main gallery, along with her eponymous video work Dark Waters (2019) in the second gallery.
Potter’s images are classified into what she identifies as three components: large format ‘waterscapes’, studio portraits of women heroines, and 'situations'—images that storytell people in the peripheries affected by the energies of a place.
The short film Dark Waters features five male American songwriters performing infamous murder ballads ‘live’ on an isolated stage and for an imagined audience. The video brings to life and sound the histories, words and complex stories alluded to in Potter’s photographs while simultaneously nodding to the complicated history of the folk tradition and genre.
While Potter’s earlier photographic series The Grey Line and Manifest explore the perspective of the feminized gaze unpacking masculine stereotypes—the American soldier or challenging the mythology of man in the American west and its photographic representations—Dark Waters hits a slightly different note: she takes on casual misogyny through the complex and violent histories echoing in the southern landscape as connected to the folk murder ballad tradition.
The origin of the series dates to Potter’s early fascination with a waterway named Murder Creek that ran through the forests near her hometown in Georgia; pondering the origin of its name and the energy that flowed along its banks was of persistent imaginative concern. In 2017, Potter officially moved to Nashville from Brooklyn, returning full time to the Southeast, and began researching the history of murder ballads in the Great American Songbook.
Over the past six years of Dark Waters’ organic development, Potter traveled by car around the greater Southeast—including Kentucky, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Tennessee—identifying, visiting, and shooting locales: specifically forested or isolated bodies of water. Potter was less interested in documenting or referencing specific histories than in pointing to the sheer prevalence of landscapes with violent namesakes in this part of the country and she was more drawn to capturing a sense of place by injecting landscapes with the potential energies and histories they can embody.
By using murder ballads as a framework for the series, Dark Waters calls attention to how the landscapes of the Southeast have been marked and scared by violence more broadly, historical but also mythologized.
From her artistic lens as a woman, this violence and power construct felt intuitively very real at times when shooting on location solo in the woods. Conversely, Potter’s portraits of women heroines were made in a studio setting, removed from any site specificity, to allow for artistic redemption and reclamation of power. In this vacuum, her heroines seemingly reappear from the waters where they were drowned, reanimated and triumphant over their fate.
Potter says of the series, “We can no longer tell whether it is our cultural ideas that make us see the landscape in a certain way, or whether the history of a place (felt or learned) creates a context for how we express ideas about it.”
In this work, Potter perhaps asks us and herself why we are captivated by stories of gendered violence, both dramatized and true. In dealing specifically with the musical tradition and the stories of these women who’ve been killed and sung about, Potter feels that Dark Waters is a “redemptive” expression.
What is the resonance, or echo of, the murder ballad convention in the present day? What attracts us to “dead-girl songs,” or in larger contemporary pop culture, the “dead girl trope,” and what does this say about our values? If we detour too quickly under mere interest in historic folk-traditions, we lose sight of very real links to contemporary statistics of gendered violence and abuse, class and racial privilege widespread in society today.
Perhaps this unspoken connection is the true ‘dark water’ that Potter’s new work swirls within: her series is an evocative visual way to indirectly speak about darkness, discomfort and violence in today’s moment.
Kristine Potter: Dark Waters
- On view: Jan 20-Mar 19, 2022
- Artist talk: Thurs, Feb 24th, 6pm EST