Samantha Roth

Double Take

April 20 - May 25, 2024.

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Press

Artforum critics’ pick review by Andrea Gyorody.

Click here to read online. Click here to download the PDF version.

Tyler Park Presents is pleased to announce Double Take, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Samantha Roth. The exhibition will be on view from April 20 – May 25, 2024.

During a total eclipse, the moon passes between the earth and the sun. Day becomes night, and colors gain new hues, prompting a rare shift in daily rhythm. A parallel can be found in the disorienting weeks and months after having a child—an experience investigated across Roth’s newest works on paper, which reimagine the topsy-turvy landscape of becoming a parent. Eerie domestic scenes mingle with theatrical, comic figuration to explore the changes in perception that accompany infancy and motherhood.

Roth’s ongoing, singular formal inquiry unifies the works on view. Before beginning a drawing, she coats both sides of a paper sheet in dense black gesso. These painted backgrounds lend each work a weighty, alien quality: in Vice Versa and Versa Vice, a playful activity—tossing colorful scarves into the air—becomes poignant and haunting, each hazy, luminescent cloth suspended in a darkened abyss. Roth’s technique accentuates her investigations of otherworldly psychic and optic states, prompting eclipse-like reversals that render the normal newly strange.

Alternate forms of visuality infuse each work. Latch, Wild Card, and After Bridget Riley take inspiration from the high-contrast images used to stimulate newborns, when their eyes cannot perceive neutral, muted tones. Roth transforms their patterned black-and-white surfaces into clownish costuming that alters the appearance of the adult body. In Wild Card, the attempt to make oneself visible to the child has the converse result for the viewer: the figure, cloaked in a polka-dot suit and white gloves, holds a sheet of paper up to its face, a wavy line drawing taking the place of the subject’s actual identity.

In Roth’s drawings, typical sights morph into mysterious visions. In Night Owl, the backside of a crowded bookshelf appears out of a dark, empty background. Glowing lamps perched on each shelf emit light that, under her hand, takes on an oozing, bacterial quality, their color leaking across the space. These unusual scenes are both mundane and magical: in Cactus Hour, a phrase used to describe a kind of “witching hour” for infants, hands emerge and clutch around the sides of cacti, as though attempting to care for its prickly exterior. The surreal, metaphorical, and literal hold equal weight in Roth’s work, emphasizing the eye’s ability to warp its surroundings under new circumstances.

“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane,” Annie Dillard wrote of her 1979 experience of the eclipse. One might add to that list the difference between playing with a baby and raising one. The former is fun, but the latter can change the way the sun appears in the sky.

-Claudia Ross

Samantha Roth (b. 1981, Brooklyn, NY) is a Los Angeles-based artist who holds an MFA from the University of Southern California, and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Duplex, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work, took place at Tyler Park Presents in 2022 and was selected as a Critics’ Pick Review in Artforum. Her second solo exhibition, A Bending Back, took place in 2023 at Public gallery in London, UK. Roth has exhibited domestically and internationally in group exhibitions at venues such as Pepin Moore in Los Angeles, CA; Luis De Jesus in Los Angeles, CA; Human Resources in Los Angeles, CA; AWHRHWAR in Los Angeles, CA; Harkawik in New York, NY; La Loma Projects in Los Angeles, CA; and Coulisse gallery in Stockholm, SE.