Amie Potsic

The LACDA Top 40 show opened on a Downtown Art Walk Thursday night 50 I also visited the 626 Gallery just down the street. There was a show of photographs by Amie Potsic called Tropicália. Although her photographs are taken with a traditional film camera, the rest of the process is completely digital.The 6 x 6 cm negatives are put through a drum scanner and translated into digital files containing over 80 million pixels.The files are opened in Photoshop which is used to do everything one could do in a traditional darkroom and then some.The image is printed using a LightJet printer that uses lasers to expose traditional photographic paper.However, Potsic does not consider her work to be digital art but instead thinks of digital technology as an invisible tool which takes images captured on film and transfers them to archival photo papers for display.

In her role as a teacher at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute, Potsic sees a strong trend towards the use of digital cameras, Photoshop, and Epson ink jet printers by the next generation of photographers.

AMIE POTSIC

Amie Potsic became fixated on scars and wounds while photographing crucifixes and Pietas in churches around San Francisco and Italy several years ago.

"A scar is a powerful symbol of mortality, and a symbol of survival," says the San Francisco photographer, whose series of photographs "Thin Skinned Thick" focused on people's scars.She'd spent two years exploring "the physical and psychological terrain of scarred human skin."

Her latest work, "Doppelganger," is a grid of large color portraits of banged-up old mannequins she photographed in Peru in 2001 -- interspersed with self-portraits of the artist recovering from facial wounds she suffered in a bus accident on the Pan-American Highway a few weeks later.

Potsic, who teaches at UC Berkeley, Ohlone College and the San Francisco Art Institute (where she received her master of fine arts degree), had been intrigued by the multitude of decaying mannequins she found in Peruvian shops.She photographed the ones that seemed "to be making eye contact with me."

She hadn't intended to juxtapose those images with the ones she took of herself, but after returning home and looking at all the pictures, "I was amazed by how (much) the portraits of me looked like the portraits of the damaged mannequins," says Potsic, 31.She began to wonder if her fascination with these wounded figures had presaged her own injury.

"The work raises questions about the nature of experience, serendipity and fate," says Potsic, whose pictures will be on display Friday through Jan. 17 in the exhibition "Other Selves" at Mission 17, 2111 Mission St. in San Francisco.