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Thrilled to be presenting some Blobsquatch paintings at Cleveland's Zygote Press in a group show with three of my favorite artists and colleagues: Deborah Carruthers, Gabriel Deerman and Margaret Hart - who also curated the exhibit. There will be a reception and artist's talk on Friday March 8, 6:00 - 8:00pm. It runs through April 26.
From the gallery statement:
Capturing the Aura of the Already Said
This exhibition brings together the work of four artists all working with issues of replication and regeneration in a multifaceted approach to both process and content. By applying techniques of printmaking, collage, photomontage and painting each artist boldly engages the social issues of contemporary life through artworks of rich, multi-layered intention in their imagery and installation.
Carruthers, Deerman and Roth address in their work the entangled and sprawling problems which have been unleashed on the planet in the time of the Anthropocene, while the work of Hart speaks to the precariousness and complexities of identity in this posthuman era. These contemporary terms of Anthropocene and Posthumanism are entwined through social, theoretical and lived experiences. This group of artists bring these issues to the forefront in their work. In a strong visual and contextual conversation these artists discuss the sustainable and the fleeting through replication and regeneration informed by their individual research into contemporary philosophy, ecological theory, and identity politics.
The text for my component of the show:
Mark Roth’s paintings find inspiration in the cryptozoological artifact of blobsquatches – a blobsquatch being the indeterminate blob in a photograph that a keen-eyed observer ascertains is a visual capture of Sasquatch. Generally they take the form of forest views with a circle drawing one’s attention to the purported creature. Roth contends the resilience of Bigfoot speaks to the persistent yearning to see primeval nature staring back at us in a form analogous to our own. In a blobsquatch the circling line is the essential component for it represents the culmination of careful scrutiny and an urgency to share the benefits of passionate looking. In these works the artist has made it his quest to locate evidence of Sasquatch in the paintings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The encircling line repeats so that the composition assumes a target shape, utilizing the notion that the bullseye represents an apogee of yearning – in this case to strike a connection with primordial painters in the wilderness of art and its making.Posted by Mark Roth at March 5, 2019 01:48 AM