Martin Roth (artist)

Much of Roth's work revolved around the introduction of living organisms into a setting or situation circumscribed by the artist. He used living organisms as a stand in for humans, to show that they're also characters caught in conditions where they don't have control."[2][3][4][3] His work, while frequently ephemeral or temporary,[3] is saturated in space.[5][4] On one level, there is the physical dimension of spaces large,[6] and small: from the quaint miniature landscapes or rocks and plants inside glass cages,[3][7] housing lizards[8] or mice[9] to the compact grid of a lavender field[10][11][12][13] shaped by the artist's arrangement in a white cube; from the beautiful patterned garden of Persian rugs sprouting verdant grass,[2][11][14] or the tepid lagoon created by flooding a gallery space,[5][15][16] to the thrust of a cherry sapling through a laminate surface,[3][17] demonstrating the interplay between an exposed space above and subterranean space[18][19] below that characterizes several of Roth's installations.[6] These physical settings often interweave with or generate acoustic spaces[20][21][16] to create the conditions for – and are, in turn, shaped by – the natural organism that inhabit them.[3][15] His work can be large-scale and particular to a site,[3][10][9] the fact that it requires the nurture[22] of living organisms[3][13] renders it strangely intimate and invites the viewer if not to engage directly,[23][16] at least to consider his or her relationship to the work on a human scale.[24][3] Roth interrogated the increasingly blurry line between human and nonhuman systems.[25]

• Roth's official website