(Anthropocene Reliquary: ebonized ash, crushed coal, found bone, digital image)
By Betsy DiJulio
I look at my work as a distillate of experience. Life events, travel, relationships, politics and dreams all condense to varying degrees into my sculpture. I synthesize, mix and mash up this experience together with my love of object making to fabricate the work. Much of my work is executed in a scale model format that stems from a boyhood interest in model railroads, cars, ships and planes. Many of these pieces reflect an interest in hybridization and polymorphism. Some of these hybrids are oneiric or the product of meditation and daydreaming. With my work I hope to engage, amuse and provoke the viewer by setting up sites for wonder and rumination. ~John R.G. Roth, Associate Professor of Art, ODU
In Mary Karr’s extensive writing and lecturing on writing, she identifies key ingredients possessed by the best memoir. Two of them are carnality and interiority; that is, vivid descriptions that appeal to the senses along with layers of emotional and psychological complexity. Certainly, the same is true in visual art. Spending time recently with Roth’s works in Modeled Experience, it occurred to me that there is both physical and emotional or psychological truth and logic to Roth’s hybrid works, all of which are a kind of visual memoir, as his artist’s statement attests.
Three distinct threads of art-making run through this intimate exhibition, all of which reveal Roth’s passion for furniture design and crafting beautifully made objects: reliquaries, paintings with 3-D or relief components, and sculptural “conveyances.” Each is also a distillation, though not in any literal or linear way, of Roth’s lived experience filtered through time, distance, dreams, and various conceptual lenses used as figurative and literal framing devices. And, it could be argued, that all seem to be distinct perspectives on the concept of connection.
For each fairly large, wall-mounted reliquary or shrine, finely finished wooden constructions take the shape of simple house forms enclosing and protecting diorama-like representations. Fashioned from ebonized ash and lit from within, Anthropocene Reliquary elevates a white bleached bone—a seal femur—atop a conical mound of crushed coal in front of a digital photo of a glacial lagoon in Iceland where Roth completed a residency a few years back. With its silvery palette, organic symmetry, formal repetition, and ethereal background forms, this constructed landscape functions almost like a 17th century vanitas painting in that a warning seems symbolically embedded in the sensual imagery.
The Anthropocene geological age refers to the current period in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet. Depicted like an abstract object of veneration or, at the very least, contemplation, are the sculptural remains of a dead animal crowning a heap of black and carbon-rich rocks—a nonrenewable fossil fuel—both of which are silhouetted against a pristine, frozen landscape shrouded in atmospheric haze. As we stand before this altar, we are asked to bear witness to the human-mediated connection between past and present, life and death, permanence and transience, actions and consequences.
With a dual focus of painting and sculpture in his master’s degree program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1990), Roth at times finds himself hovering at the cusp between the 2-D and 3-D illusionistic worlds because of, in part, his interest in materiality beyond the painted or photographed surface. The reliquaries are examples, as are his oil paintings with their toy-like models attached. The latter harken back to model building as a kid, but with an adult’s interest in human interventions in the natural world which, in turn, link back to the concerns explored in the likes of Anthropocene Reliquary.
Concurrently futuristic and art deco, friendly and foreboding, the conveyances project undercurrents of humor and absurdism, childhood hobbies, and young adult factory work. These impenetrable, anthropomorphized, industrial forms are part building, part vehicle, and part serpent complete with exquisite metallic reticulated “scales.” As such, they too boldly assume their place as part of the through-line of connection in Roth’s body of work.
WANT TO SEE?
John R G. Roth: Modeled Experience
Through February 21
Linda Matney Gallery
lindamatneygallery.com (757) 675-6627
