During the event, Potts will discuss his artistic journey, influences, and recent series, Zombie Fairies, now on view at the Musée. The evening offers attendees a unique insight into his inspirations and creative process. The talk provides an opportunity for art enthusiasts, collectors, and the public to engage directly with the artist in an intimate setting.
Known for his bold, provocative and uncompromising vision, Joe Potts has long been a favorite among fellow artists in the L.A. scene. One of his earliest champions was the American Gallery, connected to the legendary Al’s Bar, which helped introduce his work to a wider audience. Today, his fearless approach continues to earn critical respect and a growing international following. For over 50 years Joe Potts has been creating artwork that exists in the viewer’s mind. Beginning the early 1970’s Potts determined that for him, art was a response to stimuli, putting the onus of artistic creation in the hands of the viewer. Over the years he has utilized a number of techniques toward this aim including shock, subliminal information, brainwave entrainment, mirror neurons and Biogeometry to create viewer responses.
In 1975 Potts created a solo exhibition at Galeri Lunami in Tokyo which consisted of appropriations of death scene photographs from Forensic Pathology textbooks. A year later at the same gallery he showed similar images with added subliminal stimuli and a subliminal “wall of sound” audio track. In subsequent shows in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Norway, Belgium, Austria and elsewhere, Potts has continued to explore human responses through paintings and works on paper. His work is now included in the permanent collection of the Getty Research Institute. In addition to his visual explorations Joe Potts has explored the use of similar “mind control” techniques in his audio art, over the years participating in more that 3 dozen audio releases in various formats and numerous sound installations and performances in galleries, art museums and concert venues in the United States and Europe.
Potts’ new Zombie Fairies images are meant to serve both as a metaphor for Artificial Intelligence and as a solution to the toxic effects of AI on living organisms.
