Evan Roth | A hundred thousand years of light

Photography has been woven so thoroughly into the contours of our lives that we rarely stop to feel its texture. Evan Roth does. In A Hundred Thousand Years of Light, his solo exhibition at Dorothée Nilsson, Berlin, photographic images are digitally printed onto fabric and stitched with a domestic sewing machine, thread tracing a path that wanders without destination. What happens when a contemporary artist chooses quilting as the primary medium through which photographic images circulate? Against the accelerated cycles of contemporary image culture, the work proposes an alternative grounded in duration, accumulation, and the materialization of light.

What does it mean to live among images that arrive faster than thought, when the sunlight on our skin has been travelling toward us for a hundred thousand years, leaving its marks as it goes? How do light and time relate to the body, to shared experience, to the social world? These are not new questions, but they grow more urgent. Roth’s response is to translate his encounter with the Sun into the exhibition space, inviting viewers, as they move through it, to share in it.

The Sun has been radiating light in all directions for billions of years: an infinite field of possible images. Photography begins with everything and proceeds by choosing. To point a telescope at the Sun, to record this specific cloud crossing its face at this specific moment, is to collapse all of that into one frame. To print it onto fabric, to stitch it, is to collapse it further still, into something you can hold.

For the past twenty years, Evan Roth has been creating paintings, installations, photographs, and videos shown in arts institutions, in public spaces, and on the internet. Through the repurposing of tools such as cameras, software, and maps, he creates work to challenge our perceptions of typically unseen aspects of the systems and landscapes that surround us, and to amplify the role of personal agency in the face of these larger systems.
Evan Roth received a degree in architecture from University of Maryland and a MFA from the Communication, Design and Technology school at Parsons The New School for Design, where he graduated as class valedictorian. Internationally recognized, his work has been exhibited at prestigious institutions worldwide such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Art Center, Tokyo; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.. He is the recipient of the Smithsonian/Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award, the Creative Capital Award, and the Artangel Everywhere award.