Analog AR: wheysour

Analog AR: genitive

Analog AR: matris

Dazzle Camouflage

Dazzle Camouflage was a strategy first deployed by the British on their warships during WWI. Credited to zoologist John Graham Kerr, the idea was not to conceal but to confuse perception by painting the ships in disruptive, jarring patterns so that the ship’s direction of movement, scale and distance of remove became less legible to the enemy.

Here Pleistocene era creatures are subject to dazzle camouflage in the context of the mediated environment.

Dazzle-Cam strikes me as a compelling area of investigation because it:

•Represents a life-and-death utilization of aesthetic concerns.

•Suggests that aesthetics are at root a matter of abstracted biological camouflage

•Highlights the pivot point involved in rewilding and de-extinction – i.e.: is the animal emerging from extinction or receding further into the past, is the mediated environment the de facto landscape wild creatures must now breach for their survival?

Missing the Megafauna

These paintings are a companion series to the Missing The Megafauna installation at the Met. Each features a silhouetted megafauna that went extinct in the Late Pleistocene and with which humans for a time coevolved. My motivation in focusing on each successive creature is to sculpt a place in memory to house the animal.

I researched the morphology of each creature and synthesized disputed conjectures concerning particular body forms and behavior so as to arrive at what I felt might be an iconic and individualized representation of the species. This process of contemplation was a personal application of my notion that as the ecosystem degrades and our fellow creatures succumb to extinction, there is utility in taking imaginative custodianship of the departed in order to construct and maintain the memory of an intact ecosystem as a resiliency resource for assistance and refreshment through crisis and transition.

As the series unfolded I became increasingly entranced and emboldened by the prospect of exploring equivalencies between rewilding as a conservation practice and as a metaphor or strategy for Painting’s formal rejuvenation.

To investigate the possibility of resurrecting an archaic painting strategy as a form of aesthetic rewilding, I situated the series in reference to the end-game minimalism of the late 1960s, when Painting ostensibly was struggling with its own extinction event. The bifurcation of the canvas into color fields reflects a compositional strategy of Brice Marden and other hard-edge abstractionists of the era. The creatures stretch from side-to-side, articulating the boundaries of the picture plane in a manner analogous to Susan Rothenberg’s horse paintings of the 1970s, when she was engaged in her own effort to repopulate Painting by making it a sustaining environment for representation.

Blobsquatches

The Blobsquatches were featured in Capturing the Aura of the Already Said at Cleveland's Zygote Press in the Spring of 2019. The show also presented work by Deborah Carruthers, Gabriel Deerman and Margaret Hart - who curated the exhibit.

Excerpt from the gallery statement:

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.

Tumbleweeds: flashing_#242

Shrouds

The Shrouds draw inspiration from the Shroud of Turin – that relic which ostensibly records the moment Christ de-extincted Himself in a flash of brilliant light, mysteriously searing an image into the cloth. In painting terms I see them as resonant with Warhol’s Rorschach prints and the stain painting technique of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis.

Tumbleweeds: Moses_#241

Portrayals

Tumbleweeds: Averroes_#240

Tumbleweeds: Moors_#239

Tumbleweeds: imps_#238

Tumbleweeds: partner_#237

May's Acrylic Palettes