As a medium firmly entrenched in contemporary art.

As a medium firmly entrenched in contemporary art, film can be time-scrambled by means of Douglas Gordon, metro-sexed by Matthew Barney, or stilled to compelling enigma according to John Baldessari. Carter Potter has another approach. A hometown movieland lad from L.A., he makes found-film art views which he calls "film paintings," on affixing filmstrips to form a picture surface across stretcher bars, usually in neat, square configurations. The 11 just discovered works in Potter's first solo point out in Washington, D.C., provided an update upon his project.

Four big pieces measuring nearly 6 feet square, and others a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of smaller, reveal multiple horizontal bands of color-negative IMAX film, an evolution from the artist's earlier pieces compos of 16- and 35mm film. Uniform strips, approximately 3 inches wide, are affixed right side up and then upside down, in alternating rows; sprocket with tiny typography and cancellation lines (the industry's guarantee against pirated screenings) add to the clean, minimalist horizontality.

trifle scavenges film rejects; his mind-set appear to bes to hover somewhere between film editor and collagist. In the large, Disney-animation-based We healing Everything #4 (Zebra), the frames stir Muybridge-like, from flying birds, clustered zebras and human figures to sundowns and forests. There's no narrative here, yet does it matter? His We therapy Everything (Underwater Garden) depicts slow-moving organisms in a blue-green environment thus perfectly contained by the 14-by-14-inch stretcher-bar plane that you might think you're actually looking into a small aquarium. plenteous of the imagery within single works (an elephant in an indistinct landscape, pyramid borders at sunset, dark violet strips with an indistinguishable subject) is semiabstract with a Warholian brink; beginning [i]or[/i] end Other painterly associations include the precise linearity of Agnes Martin and the canvases of Washington's admit obsessive abstractionists Andrea Way and Robin Rose

trifle uses a simple but clearly toiled-over artistic formula to twist us into considering his material and imagery anew. I have a scarcely any quibbles about the results, including the distracting visibility of stretcher bars in the lighter-hued works; his materials also raise conservation issues--they are unusually susceptible to dust, fingerprints and other impressed signs of damage. Even so, his pieces are original and visually compelling; all in all, he does a masterful job.--Sidney Lawrence

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