Daniel Roth has assembled drawings, photos and installations to produce non-linear narratives related to specific existing locations, most notably their topography and history, which in this case is the peninsula of Portmeirion in Wales. The compilation is inconsistent, shifting between past, present and future, and between fact and fiction. Roth plays with the tension evoked by this remote place with its unusual inhabitants; it makes an ideal background for possible stories.
Roth’s works are abstracted but imaginative approaches to his chosen narratives. They provide additional layers of meaning that overlap with the existing stories of Portmeirion. The sculptures appear to be ruins, which do not refer literally to known elements of one of the stories but might nonetheless be relics of them. Two large, tapering anthracite blocks, Two Towers (2008) with cavities and broken edges, tower over the scene from the middle of the exhibition space, like the remains of towers built by Clough Ellis Williams. The photograph is poetic and was apparently found, as archive material, but it radiates a certain tension, with a suggestion of a gate opening onto a hidden world.
Opening: March 21st: 5-7 pm