The Wild Project is pleased to present Back to the Future, a solo exhibition of photographs by Rob Roth October 13th – 30th 2010.

The works in this exhibition were created specifically for the spectacular New York club event Click + Drag, which ran for four years beginning in 1996. Founded by Roth with nightlife legends Chi Chi Valenti and Kitty Boots, Click + Drag began as a Saturday-night weekly event at Valenti’s experimental MOTHER nightclub and ran for four years in over two hundred editions, each with a different theme. Exploring the interface between nightclubs and computer culture with a strictly enforced dress code, the event quickly built a fanatic following. The textures of those nights were otherworldly, created and enhanced by Roth’s pioneering video installations and performances that both encouraged and complimented the antics of his guests.

Created between 1999 and 2001, most of the photographs selected for the exhibition were shot for Click + Drag’s much coveted and collected flyers. The flyers depicted an eclectic mix of rock stars, dominatrixes, transsexuals, strippers and fetishists. Necessity was the mother of invention for Roth, who shot the portraits in his small Manhattan studio apartment with Kitty Boots as stylist and Marla Belt on makeup.

Despite Roth’s well-regarded reputation as a pioneering digital artist, the majority of the images were deliberately shot using 35 mm film and printed on the now discontinued Fujiflex paper, with absolutely no retouching. Always going against the trend Roth made this decision as the world went digital. The results were small color prints that possess a striking, oversaturated, jewel-like quality and present the subjects as iconic, patron saints of desire, transformation and sexuality.