Amie Potsic
Berwyn
Amie Potsic is a photographer and installation artist who addresses cultural, personal, and natural phenomena through the lens of social responsibility.
MessageCollection: Tropicália
Colorful, sensual, musical, and boisterous, Brazilian public celebrations are exuberant national rituals involving processions and parades that wend their way down main streets of towns with multi-colored flags overhead and music in the air. Brazilians become truly united only during Carnival, when the national soccer team plays, during some religious holidays, and at the time of civic festivals. Enabling disparate social groups to come together and forget the difficulty of their lives, public celebrations allow for a divided society to temporarily suspend the strong, yet unspoken, rules governing race, class, culture, and religion. These rules extend to an institutional division of public and private space, rendering the majority of the population without property or prosperity. Those who possess private space often protect it with broken glass slicing upward from walls surrounding their property. Guarding private land and buildings with such fiercely physical means seems to be in direct proportion to the powerful physicality that is palpable in the throws of Brazilian celebrations. While contemporary Brazil has made real progress in embracing the mixing of races, respecting a variety of religious practices, and caring for its needy, these protective shards of glass stand as embodiments of the country’s history of slavery, colonialism, racism, and nationalism.
Underneath the surface of their vibrant community festivals, there exists a jagged reminder that private space and resources remain largely unattainable by most. Seeing the warm inclusiveness of their festivals alongside the cutting glass of exclusion led me to wonder how people with such strong community bonds could simultaneously be so divided. Enamored with their celebrations and troubled by their separation, my work seeks to address the dynamics of contradiction in a culture of overwhelming passion, pleasure, and pain.
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