Maddie Potocnik and the Beauty of the Ephemeral: Inside surface treasure
- Sean Dean
- 30 oct
- 3 Min. de lectura
Actualizado: 31 oct
In the vastness of the internet, beauty often exists only for a moment. Lost in scrolls of listings, transactions, and fleeting words, it disappears almost as quickly as it appears. For artist and designer Maddie Potocnik, that impermanence became the foundation of surface treasure, a digital magazine that turns Craigslist’s forgotten corners into an archive of anonymous poetry and visual still life.
surface treasure, now on its sixth issue, is a 100-page digital magazine filled with found images and “missed connections” gathered from New York City’s Craigslist pages. Each month, Maddie combs through the “for sale” and “missed connections” sections, not as a buyer or voyeur, but as a quiet collector. What she saves are not objects, but fragments of lives, tones of desire, strange compositions, and unintentional art.
Within this public forum designed for the mundane, small-scale trades, confessions, and personal notes, Maddie uncovers acts of vulnerability and abstraction, patterns in color, technique, and voice. These anonymous traces form what she calls “digital treasure,” each rescued from its inevitable disappearance after Craigslist’s thirty-day expiration.
“In saving to my hard drive, I feel as though I’m rescuing beautiful digital treasure from its imminent death,” - Maddie writes.
Explore her full image collection here: https://surfacetreasure.neocities.org/.
Issue Six of surface treasure gathers 150 of her favorite images and 28 missed connections collected throughout September 2025. None of the content is her own, she states, and all credits belong to the anonymous authors and image-makers whose posts were destined to vanish. The work is less about authorship and more about preservation, an ongoing act of digital archaeology.
Download the the latest issue of surface treasure here: https://maddiepotocnik.metalabel.com/
Visually, the magazine feels like an intimate gallery of found art, a blend of still life, portraiture, and collage, unified by Maddie’s delicate sense of layout and rhythm. The result is something between anthology and a time capsule, an ever-evolving reflection of New York’s collective subconscious.
Through surface treasure, Maddie transforms what might have been forgotten into something timeless. It’s a reminder that art is everywhere, in the overlooked, the anonymous, and the transient spaces where human emotion still lingers.
Finding beauty in the unconventional and, often, in the most conventional. There’s poetry in the ordinary, meaning in the discarded, and truth in the things most people pass by. surface treasure embodies that philosophy: that creativity doesn’t always begin with invention, but with the recognition of the quiet ability to see art where others see nothing at all.
Explore surface treasure
Discover more of Maddie’s ongoing archive and collection through the links below:
Visit Maddie’s website: maddiepotocnik.info
Follow Maddie on Instagram: @maddiexpoto
Explore the full image collection: surfacetreasure.neocities.org
Download each issue or support surface treasure: maddiepotocnik.metalabel.com
surface treasure is a monthly digital magazine filled with found images and text from NYC’s Craigslist page, an evolving archive of the ephemeral, the poetic, and the profoundly human.
This article was written in collaboration with Maddie Potocnik, with her full permission and support. All descriptions and references to surface treasure are credited to Maddie, whose ongoing work continues to celebrate the art of the overlooked.
Special thanks to Maddie for sharing her time, materials, and insight, and for reminding us that even in the most transient digital spaces, beauty persists.
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