Martin Roth, “Garden for a Plant Concert”

Martin Roth
From 2017-2021 Martin Roth Transformed a Ruin Into a Garden for a Plant Concert
July 10 – October, 2021
Open weekends, 12-5
120 Grand St. Newburgh, NY 12550
Presented by STRONGROOM Strongroom https://www.strongroom.us/

Martin Roth (1977 – 2019)

STRONGROOM is pleased to present a site-specific installation conceived by late artist Martin Roth in 2017.

Known as the “Newburgh City Club,” this site has been in ruin for decades with the interior completely overtaken by nature. This building was one of the first collaborations between Calvert Vaux and Andrew Jackson Downing in 1852, and one of the last standing structures designed by Downing in Newburgh, his home town. Downing was an influential designer, horticulturist, writer, and tastemaker, and became known as the “Father of American landscape design.”

Martin Roth planned to turn the interior of the structure into a “plant concert” and public garden, ironically referencing Downing’s philosophy that homes should exist harmoniously with nature, and exploring the idea of parks as domesticated nature. The project will pay homage to this history and provide an immersive experience in which the plants will create their own sound using biofeedback technology. Visitors will be invited to enter an abandoned building-turned-garden, and experience a concert made by the trees.” Referencing A.J. Downing’s ideas for this building when it was first built as the home of William Culbert, Martin said, “It will be as Downing stated, ‘a home with a garden.'”

In 2019 Martin tragically passed away as he was about to complete this project. This year Strongroom has finished the installation according to his plans.

Martin said, “For the duration of the exhibition, the building will exist in two parallel realities as the site of the former City Club, but also as the home of this new illusionary public garden. I will work closely with the natural environment of trees and bushes that already exist inside the site, but alter it, and in a sense cultivate it, with more colorful plants and flowers, and a winding path believe that if you change reality just a little bit, everything changes.”

Martin Roth was born in Austria in 1977, and died in New York in 2019. He was an installation artist whose work manifested in poetic interpretations of the sites he used, creating a set of parameters in which the environment itself can become an actor or collaborator in the piece. In his installations, Roth often played with the clash of the natural and artificial, consistently questioning the various interdependencies that make up one’s habitat, and emphasizing the idea of a “natural environment through a mutual contamination of organic and artificial elements. Often centered around the nurture of living organisms, his works are strangely intimate and invite the viewer to engage directly, and consider their relationship to the work on a human scale. Martin’s work has been exhibited internationally, including group exhibitions at The Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Künstlerhaus and mumok, Vienna, Austria: Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin, Germany, The Artist’s Institute and Kunstraum, New York, NY, and solo shows at Capitol Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Biquini Wax, Mexico City, Mexico; and Louis B. James, New York, NY. He also had solo exhibitions at the Austrian Cultural Foundation, yours mine and ours gallery in New York City, and the Riverside Art Museum in Beijing.

FREE UPCOMING PROGRAMS More information at www.strongroom.us Johanna Porr, Orange County Historian: “Downing and Vaux: Collaboration and Friendship” Two dates Saturday July 17th: 4-5 PM & Sunday August 22nd: 11-12 AM Arnaud Gerspacher, Art Historian “Martin Roth and the Critical Possibilities of Wonder” Saturday August 28th: 3-4 PM Peter Del Tredici, Botanist “A Walk on the Wild Side: How Plants Adapt to Urban Habitats” Saturday September 25, 1-2 PM STRONGROOM is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Newburgh, NY producing pop-up contemporary art exhibitions www.strongroom.us info@strongroom.us Instagram: strongroom.inc / Facebook: @strongroom inc.

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