Evan Roth

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Born 1978, Lansing, Michigan; lives in Berlin, Germany

Since You Were Born, 2020; Jeu de Paume, Paris, February 11,2020 – June 7, 2020; wall paper; 4 x 38 x 33 ft/1.22 x 11.58 x 10.05 m

Letters, numbers, symbols—for those of us that are not familiar with code, what the internet actually looks like is a non-sensible jumble. Interested in pursuing the connections between us, that is the users, and technology, Evan Roth shows us in pictures, all of our internet activity through the accumulated streams of images passively collected through daily Internet browsing. Are we an amalgam of what we look up and communicate? Evan Roth posits that a present day portrait can be formed through a presentation of all the images that the sitter views on the internet during the course of a day, or week, or month. The artist archived the collected traces of his interests and activities and transposed them onto hanging prints, bringing his private explorations into the public space. The tradition of the sitter continues, into a new realm, now stationed in front of his/her device of choice. Here we see the massive accumulation of images from the artist’s own computer, since the birth of his second daughter, covering the lofty walls of the Jeu de Paume in Paris. The blur of images might be seen as a modern day translation of Impressionism—the galleries beyond hold the Claude Monet Waterlilies, made specifically for these oval galleries—as Monet’s amorphous brush strokes build up to create the image of a specific place, and Roth’s patchwork of specific images give us a thorough self-portrait in a sense. This monumental installation is part of Roth’s Internet Cache Self Portrait series, 2014-ongoing.

Evan Roth trained as an architect at the University of Maryland and went on to Parsons The New School for Design to earn his MA in Communications, Design and Technology where he was class Valedictorian. After a few years as a Research and Development Fellow and then a Senior Fellow from at Eyebeam, 2005-2007, the open source creative technology lab for the public domain, Evan went on to form Free Art and Technology Research Lab, an Internet-based art-and-technology collective dedicated to the intersection of open-source hacking and popular culture. He had already co-founded Graffiti Research Lab in 2005.

Roth’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. It has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; the Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; the Tate, London, United Kingdom; and in the XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature: Design in Italy among others. It has been the front page of YouTube. He has received numerous awards, including the Golden Nica from Prix Ars Electronica, Rhizome/The New Museum commissions and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award.

http://www.evan-roth.com/shows/

photo © Jeu de Paume, by François Lauginie