Roth's iconoclastic body of artwork includes everything from sound recordings to works made with organic materials intended to decay over time. Throughout his career, however, books and other printed material provided the most fertile ground for his artistic experimentation.
While on a residency at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art in 1964, Roth initiated Snow, for which he created some six thousand drawings, photographs, and collages. He selected five hundred of these to be reproduced in a book, but the publication was canceled and the artist returned to Iceland with his work. In 1969, Roth turned his unpublished book project into an installation by adding a table—on which the spiral–bound volume rests here—and two wooden chairs. A year later, a book version of Snow was finally printed as the eleventh volume of Roth's self–published catalogue raisonné.
Gallery label from Book/Shelf, March 26–July 7, 2008.