​ROGER ROTHSTEIN

 

 

In his "Nuclear Landscape Collage Series," bits of generic greeting cards and shiny posters bearing imagery of nuclear bomb detonations at such sites as White Sands. N. M., and the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific are quietly integrated into otherwise innocent landscapes. Subtly menacing, such subjects undermine the scenes' apparent tranquility. Rothstein sets up his compositions with genuine skill and accomplished craft, yet in integrating motifs of waste and violence, he leaves us aware of the extent to which our throwaway culture's appreciation of the past, and of other heritages, is affected more by immediate gratification than a tilt toward the sublime.

                                                                       

                                                                                      -Jonathan Goodman, Art in America Jan. 2006