Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Photography exhibit examines violence against women
BENTONVILLE — Kristine Potter: Dark Waters, an exhibition of richly detailed black-and-white photographs, opens to the public at the Momentary today.
The photographs, mainly landscapes and portraits, are supported by a video and sound installation and are “inspired by enigmatic terrain surrounding bodies of water that bear names of violence in the American South, places like ‘Murder Creek,’ ‘Deadman’s Branch,’ and ‘Bloody Fork,’” according to a press release.
“These are absolutely beautiful photographs, and you’re going to be swept away by them,” said Alejo Benedetti, Momentary curator of contemporary art.
The exhibition is on view through Oct. 13. Potter, the artist, is the grand prize winner of the 2023 Hariban Award and an assistant professor of photography at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
Dark Waters is accompanied by Potter’s second monograph, co-published by the Momentary and Aperture magazine, but isn’t exactly like it, Benedetti promised.
“To translate that from a book you hold and look at into an exhibition that you’re going to experience is … truly a transition,” he said. “It’s an exhibition that you’re not just going to see, you’re going to feel.”
Potter was present during a press preview Friday to introduce her works and kept her comments brief, saying it’s best to experience the art first. Next to the works are numbers, rather than traditional placards, to allow visitors to experience them and let it bring up their own associations before adding in someone else’s, she explained.
The opening area of Dark Waters is meant to feel a bit like an open mic night at a hole-in-the-wall honky tonk, Potter said. Each of the people performing in the video screened are men, and they’re all casually singing “murder ballads,” songs in which women are killed and left in rivers and forests.
“It’s not meant to be anachronistic; it’s mostly to make you think about how much entertainment you actually engage in that recounts a kind of gendered violence,” Potter said, using the example of TV shows, films, true crime podcasts, stories of abuse and violence against women, which she described as a part of our cultural diet. “The work is responding to the cumulative effect of the kinds of stories we tell about place and how particularly for women that contributes to how we experience place.”
Potter is a photographer who typically works regionally, but she’s interested in the mythology of the U.S., the stories Americans tell about themselves, as well as the archetypes of masculinity.
When she began working in the South, she became interested in the history of violence in the southern landscape. Potter oriented herself to the topic by using the bodies of water with ominous names, wondering how something like “Murder River” got, and kept, its name.
Potter began photographing for the project in 2015 and prints everything herself, she said. The resulting works — taken in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina — are not journalistic in answer but rather “lyrical documentary form” and focus on how the settings make the viewer feel.