Teletext Exhibitiontext.
Becks Ireland
2026
Teletext, the actual thing, is described as “an obsolete, television-based information service.” I think Potenger’s monotypes could be described as an “obsolete screen-based information service” too, with their jumbled visual language that whispers to you in tongues. A directory to a busy mind.
The prints are crunchy, like sun-faded tobacco-stained takeaway menus left abandoned by your landline that you haven’t made a call from in years, and forgot you still had.
Potenger’s digital detritus from the APS residency was strewn across her Instagram stories. There was a resounding sense of glee as the prints went through the press. The camera shook in her hands as she darted from one end of the press to the other, with the anticipation of a child who’s dropped a leaf off a bridge and raced it to the other side.
The joy Potenger exudes during art making becomes another piece of studio detritus - and faces the same fate. It is woven and wedged and pressed into the prints.
The images are scraps on scraps on scraps. Like a compost bin. Like the surface of your desk when you’re done cutting up magazines. Like listening to bFM as you drive through a tunnel. Kind of crunchy. Crunchy scraps on scraps on scraps.
These scraps aren’t getting into scraps, though. They are not fighting for your attention. They almost seem to wait their turn, working as a team to rouse confusion, then clarity, in their viewer.
Purple waits in the wings, bouncing off Orange and landing in Green’s arms. It lies next to Yellow, who you hadn’t noticed was on stage until just now. Green slithers over and extends a hand to Orange, leaving Brown to fill the fringes of their touch. Blue dabs in and out, running forward and then back behind the curtain of Red, once again becoming Purple.
The choreography seems uncoordinated until the final image congregates, and you’ve taken it all in. There’s a connectedness of colour across the series as a byproduct of their making. In Printland, colours can’t be changed as easily as they can in Painting Town. Here, the layers of colour feel like fruit leathers, distilled and preserved versions of flavours commonly known.
During her time at the residency, Potenger wrote that having to pluck the colours from her imagination and then articulate them so John Pusateri could mix the inks was a new experience; her process of colour making is usually a solitary and agile endeavour. Left in her notes was an anecdote about a time Pusateri made a colour that reminded her of her mum’s lipsticks.
You can play in Potenger’s images like you’re doing a word search. The prompts are nods to books once read, fun facts newly acquired, shards of shiny press-on nails, and a piece of technology modern society has long forgotten.
Sometimes, though, if I look too closely for too long, I feel like I’m stuck in a game of Operation. As if the tweezers of my gaze could reach through the layers to pluck at the last glimpse of the substrate, though I’m sweating and my hands are shaking, because I know the edges of the shapes will yell at me if I clip them.
It’s important to note that once the prints start sounding like KidPix and dial up, it’s time to look away. They’ve told you too much.
Art New Zealand 154/Winter 2015