August 5, 2020
Girl in the Garden: Danger in Paradise is a nuanced response to climate change conveyed through the compelling viewpoints of girlhood, deforestation, and Magical Realism. With new photographic works and installations, Potsic explores female agency, the wooded lifeblood of our planet, and the fate of humankind. After photographing her daughter in the lush forests of the northeastern United States, Potsic traveled to Paradise, California and surrounding forests (located upwind from her extended family’s home) to photograph the complete devastation caused by the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history. Personal experience underscoring the urgency of climate change, Potsic intertwines visions of girlhood in paradise with nature’s unprecedented destruction caused by wildfires.
The garden being a place of innocence and danger has long dominated our view of nature tracing back to Romanticism, Enlightenment philosophy, the Bible, and our earliest human religions. Now, with wildfires raging in California and the Amazon at alarming rates, deforestation has reached biblical proportions spanning the globe. Simultaneously in American culture, the female empowerment movement recently surged allowing for more complex definitions of femininity than ever before. Examining the concept of Paradise through contemporary lenses of climate change and gender, Potsic creates a narrative and physical space that invites personal connection and individual action.
Click here to access the full Girl in the Garden press kit.
© Amie Potsic, Vision Detail, Mixed Media on Panel, 36” x 72”, 2019