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We at Daily Plinth think this is an interesting and powerful project, so we wanted to see what we could do to help Martin Roth for his exhibition at yours mine & ours gallery.

From Martin Roth on Kickstarter:

In November 2017 I collected a plant from the garden of a mass shooter.

This exhibition is not an attempt to politicize the shooting or minimize the tragedy. Rather, it is an investigation that asks how the organic world can offer us all a space for dialogue.

I’m Martin Roth, an Austrian-born New-York based artist, and I’ve spent the past several months traveling to the home of the Las Vegas Strip shooter Stephen Paddock. While exploring Paddock’s garden, I found an outlier: a single small saltbush called the desert holly growing out of the gravel-covered garden. For my upcoming exhibition on March 31st at yours mine & ours in New York, I am examining the healing powers of this desert holly.

By giving agency to plants and by viewing them as collaborators, I hope to raise questions about how we cope with violence. I don’t believe in a hierarchy of humans, animals, and plantlife, and with my work, I hope to show how plants can change us — and affect change.

Stephen Paddock was the deadliest mass shooter in U.S. history. Despite months of searching by the police and the press on behalf of the American people, Paddock’s motive for the shooting is still unknown, so I went to try and find out myself.

Why is this important?
With this new project, I aim to investigate the idea of assigning meaning to a plant found in a specific environment.

Stephen Paddock lived in a calm and tranquil retirement community in Mesquite, an hour’s drive from Las Vegas, Nevada. Like many gardens in hot climates, Paddock’s is covered in gravel; however, his was especially barren. All bushes and shrubs seemed to have been planted at random without any thought or affection. All the plants had been purchased in a local nursery but, while studying the property, I discovered a tiny native plant growing. It was the single element out of place in this lifeless garden of sharply trimmed and perfectly round bushes. I investigated further and discovered it was Atriplex Hymenelytra, or the desert holly. This tiny silvery-whitish-gray desert saltbush is native to the American Southwestern sand and is the most drought tolerant saltbush in North America. It lives despite its circumstance.

Native American plant shamanism prescribes that the antidote to one’s troubles can be found naturally occuring in the plants of one’s immediate environment. With that in mind, I want to display this desert holly plant in New York City to provide a space for observation and reflection. Please join me as we realize this next immersive project.