Ben Roth: Earthrise

Earthrise by Ben Roth
The Center Courtyard
On view September 2020 - August 2022
Curated by Agnes Bourne as part of the 2020 Creative in Residence: Sustain

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About Ben Roth

I have been a student, traveler, adventurer, restaurateur, and artist. In art I found my path. I enjoy the exploration process of my ideas and their eventual prototyping and creation from raw materials and found objects. I discovered my medium while building restaurants. Although I studied some art in college, it wasn’t until I began to design and build with metal that I realized where I wished to focus my energy. The past few years, during which I have lived and worked as an artist, have proved to be a satisfying and continuing education. I’ve learned that clay, plaster, glass, wood, fiberglass, iron, steel, and bronze all work beautifully to give life to my ideas. I am now sculpting, building furniture, making wall-hung art and teaching young people art design and construction here in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

 

Earthrise Artist Statement

It is interesting creating art in the time of COVID 19. I tend to sculpt things with an optimist bent but have found such feelings more allusive lately. The place where I still see and feel hope is in nature, especially in the morning as a new day is beginning. The cyclical patterns of birth and death and growth and decomposition that I see in nature have a steadying force on my outlook toward the future. The rising of the sun and flow of the river are predictable and comforting. They are a reminder that time marches on and that the only constant is change. The form of Earthrise is created with cross-cut sections of dead tree trunks from a local ranch. Earthrise can be contemplated from the deck above the courtyard or experienced individually within the Center.