Mike Roth is a visual artist from the United States currently working in Brooklyn, NY. Drawing from Romantic poetry, detective movies, and public spaces in the city, his current artistic work bridges color, shapes, and words to the emotional and physiologically chaotic environment that surrounds him.
Since 2014, he has co-led the live/work collective known as The SkyFortress as its Captain. Within The SkyFortress, he has co-organized events and installations that people from all over the city, and the world, are invited to share food, art and conversation. The living space is opened to the public many times a year.
Most recently, he has finished a large installation of a structure that resembles the shape and size of an NYC subway car. This painting mimics the tight space to catalyze the claustrophobic anxiety of travelling under the city. But placed high in a factory loft and made from mosquito net and resin, Roth’s sculpture transforms into much more that just a train - it is a time machine, an old wooden ship, a car, a spaceship, phone booth, or teleportation device. His space is constructed as a meditative vessel, that travels through the emotional space of time, rather than physical. The illusion of its transparency from the mosquito net and paint, connect the outer space and the inner; the public and the self.
A computer engineering dropout, Roth moved to Massachusetts to study art on his own, eventually graduating from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a BFA in Studio Art. His work at university was anything but orthodox - employing computer programming, drawing, and sculpture to create cinematic, and sometimes musical, gatherings filled with food, sound, and light. After graduating, Roth moved to NYC to continue his work as a painter in the burgeoning creative universe of Bushwick, Brooklyn.
His current work is large and colorfull. Using common ingredients like packing tape, pieces of ordinary paper, laser prints, traffic cones, tires, pvc piping or paint, he constructs large energetic paintings from inexpensive materials.
Drawing every day, Roth also writes poetry as a supplement to explain and connect his work to its emotional roots. Making larger work and experimenting with more complex mediums, Mike Roth continues to accomplish creating and imbuing a new class of emotional energy for the public that excites and fuses the body and mind together.
