Much of Roth's work revolved around the introduction of living organisms into a setting or situation circumscribed by the artist.
He used living organisms as a stand in for humans, to show that they're also characters caught in conditions where they don't have control.
[6][5] On one level, there is the physical dimension of spaces large,[7] and small: from the quaint miniature landscapes or rocks and plants inside glass cages,[4][8] housing lizards[9] or mice[10] to the compact grid of a lavender field[11][12][13][14] shaped by the artist's arrangement in a white cube; from the beautiful patterned garden of Persian rugs sprouting verdant grass,[3][12][15] or the tepid lagoon created by flooding a gallery space,[6][16][17] to the thrust of a cherry sapling through a laminate surface,[4][18] demonstrating the interplay between an exposed space above and subterranean space[19][20] below that characterizes several of Roth's installations.
[7] These physical settings often interweave with or generate acoustic spaces[21][22][17] to create the conditions for – and are, in turn, shaped by – the natural organism that inhabit them.
[25][4] Roth interrogated the increasingly blurry line between human and nonhuman systems.