Marc Roder: Artist Statement

I am an immigrant to the core. Perhaps not surprisingly, my work reflects on processes of gathering and discarding, voyaging, and settling. In my paintings the accumulations of human debris suggest a world where the life of the object stands in for the presence of the figure and biological activity. Human striving and tinkering are strewn over the armature of earth, water and sky. In these paintings landscape is a jumping off point for narrative, it is an imaginary ground in which I can locate social, art historical and psychological concerns.
Everything depicted in my work probably has happened or probably will happen to me, and possibly to the viewer as well. The paintings flirt with disaster, and sometimes disaster flirts back.


January, 2011