Rob Roth
HAPPY ACCIDENTS
July 9 – August 30, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 9th 6-9pm
rel·i·quar·y
/ˈreləˌkwerē/
Noun
a container for holy relics.
wild project is proud to present HAPPY ACCIDENTS, a solo exhibition of 45 polaroid works by artist and director Rob Roth. Friends, lovers, muses, and metropolitan texture in locations spanning Brazil, Paris, Madrid, and New York City, are presented as singular sacred objects of Roth’s private life. Some are decorated as shrines, embellished with gold leaf, ink, and glitter. Shot over a decade, the series marks Roth’s most personal presentation of his photographic practice to date.
Drawing from goth, camp, drag, and pagan influence, Roth contends with the preservation of the everyday as relic. He juxtaposes the erotic and flamboyant with the quiet and mystical and asserts a commitment to ritual, analog immediacy, and the documentation of ethereality.
Subjects include Parker Posey in a Paris hotel, Ruth Negga in a Whitechapel alleyway, Morgan Spector in the woods, Jenny Runacre backstage at the Alternative Miss World in London, Wayne Kostenbaum at his home in NYC, Majur in Brazil, and China on Fire Island. These are interspersed with images of queer intimacy and urban decay: plugs, portals, lyrical fragments, and obstructed environments. Roth’s creative collaboration with Blondie weaves throughout, with backstage and BTS portraits of Debbie Harry around the globe.
About the Artist
Rob Roth (b. 1968, New York City) is an artist and director working across performance, film, and visual art. Emerging from the underground of ‘90s New York, including Jackie 60 and Click + Drag, Roth has developed a practice that continues to shape queer subculture. His recent Polaroid work appears in Bob Mizer Foundation Physique Pictorial Magazine 74 (2026). He has collaborated extensively with Debbie Harry and Blondie, directing projects including Harry’s New York Times bestselling memoir Face It, “Doom or Destiny” featuring Joan Jett, and Blondie: Vivir En La Habana, which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. His theater work includes Soundstage (HERE Arts Center, 2018), featuring Rebecca Hall, praised as “a lusciously designed… queer exorcism” and declared by the New York Times as “deftly evoking the fleeting transition from wakefulness to dreaming.”
