"As a way to confront the emotional toll of overcast winters, Evan Roth began seeking out the sun, a meditative process where he searches for the moments when sunlight peeks through the parting clouds around his home in Berlin. For Pathfinding, Roth applies this practice to the Arizona sky. By digitally manipulating photographs using centuries-old cartographic mathematics utilized in map making, he distorts images he captured of the Scottsdale sky. The algorithms he uses were originally designed to translate spheres, like the Earth, to a flattened, two dimensional plane for maps. This process creates distortions in the form and scale of the original images. One of the results of this experimentation is a slow-moving, meditative video of the sky melting and morphing into itself. The photographs that Roth captured during his time in Scottsdale also appear in his embroidered quilts. Each stitched line is a visual representation of the historic cartographic math that was used to warp the image of the sky printed on the fabric, revealing his process and illustrating the precise mark making of the thread.

Roth marries his experience of home in Berlin, where sunlight can often be sparse, and his interest in the mathematics of map-making to present a unique way of looking at the skies over Scottsdale. He seamlessly blends contemporary technology with historic processes and brings a perspective that challenges us to consider our biases and the impact that sunlight has on our well-being while grounding our relationship to the sky. These new site specific artworks reflect a search for slowness, light, and warmth, using the sky above Scottsdale as both source and inspiration."

~ Julie Ganas, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art

https://skyscaps.es