To HMP Weare, Portland
17 Apr 2004 - 22 May 2004
To HMP Weare, Portland
Galerie Fons Welters proudly presents a new solo exhibition by German artist Daniel Roth (Schramberg, 1969). It is the second solo by Roth at Galerie Fons Welters, after Love Letters from Rijeka in 2001. The artist, who combines drawings, photographs, and objects in installations with strong narrative qualities, has done various international solo shows over the past years, including 701XXKA, at Inside the White Cube and Kunstverein Graz, and Schatzhauser Wald at Galerie Meyer Riegger (Karlsruhe). Roth lives and works in Karlsruhe.
To HMP Weare, Portland is a typical Daniel Roth-title: it suggests a journey, or at least some kind of activity between points A and B. The artist's oeuvre is dominated bij representations of both real and mental spaces, and the (imaginary) networks that connect them. In his work, relationships are established between places that don't necessarily have anything in common. Roth provides the spectator with a set of narrative starting points, a storyboard, in which the main plot of a mysterious history is sketched. Because essential information is kept behind by the artist, or is only partly revealed, a fragmented suspense-story unfolds itself - only to be fully reconstructed in the spectator's imagination.
In the installations of Daniel Roth, fragile perspective drawings play in important part: within the boundaries of these drawings irrational elements enter the suggested storyline. They are usually renderings of spaces where technology and architecture are fighting a lost battle: the existing structure is mutating, and uncanny organic shapes break into the everyday Lauf der Dinge. Roth strongly appeals to our fears for the unknown, and our fascination with the irrationality and uncontrollable force of nature. One could think of Roth's work as a soft, suspenseful science fiction - Twin Peaks directed by David Cronenberg.
In To HMP Weare, Portland, the artist investigates the history of Cabrini Green Forest, a subterranean forest that is slowly spreading out from the basement of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago, and that is connected to various exterritorial prison ships - among them is the HMP Weare in Portland, England. Through the use of objects, photographs, postcards, magazine cuttings, and drawings, the spectator is given an impression of these places and their mutual connections. These works are emphatically part of an overall installation, in which architectural elements have been added to the gallery structure.
The storyline surrounding Cabrini Green Forest will also be the starting point for Roth's exhibitions at Donald Young Gallery in Chicago (May), and Manifesta 5 (June-September).
[Xander Karskens]
More info about Daniel Roth