Blobsquatches at Adjacent to Life

Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent to Life, presents Blobsquatches by Mark Roth.

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.

Here the encircling lines of the blobsquatches are drawn from painting referents where the composition rotates around a central locus. This target-like shape utilizes the notion that a bullseye represents an apogee of yearning – in this case to strike a connection with primordial painters in the wilderness of art and its making.

Blobsquatches is on view through October 17, 2024 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).