Mark Roth - Tumbleweeds

March 18, 2017

The Phatory is pleased to announce that Mark Roth’s Tumbleweeds exhibition has been extended to May 1st and will open by appointment through then.  Call 212-358-0028 to make one.

The tumbleweed - or Russian Thistle - is an immigrant from Eurasia. It initially hopped a ride in a flax seed shipment to South Dakota in 1877 and proceeded to become an essential symbol of the American West. In an exploration of the tumbleweed as an icon, metaphor and dynamic formal structure, Roth fills the gallery with 146 paintings that find the diaspore bounding along multiple lines of flight. Representing a four-year painterly inquiry and narrative, the tumbleweeds roll through Modernism with spinning vortexes exploring collage, compositional concerns, megafaunal extinction, cave painting, nostalgia, structural collapse and the enchantment of the natural world.

A graduate of the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Roth currently has an augmented reality installation, Missing The Megafauna, situated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His previous series Grazer’s Gaze: The Grass Paintings has been published in the University of Oxford’s Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities.