Berlin-based artist Evan Roth is the latest to be drawn in by the sky’s mystique for an upcoming exhibition at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

For Roth, the emotional toll of Germany’s long, overcast winters sparked two series of work featuring the sky: slow-moving, meditative videos and large-scale quilts. For his SMoCA exhibition, “Pathfinding,” which opens Oct. 11, new site-specific versions of these artworks will reflect a search for slowness, light and warmth, using the sky above Scottsdale as both source and inspiration.

The artist, who was born in the United States, began photographing the sky above Berlin as “a kind of meditation,” watching for those moments when the clouds would break. He then applied a “historic lens” to the photos, digitally morphing the images through the use of centuries-old cartographic mathematics, which were designed to translate spheres into planes — like taking a globe of the Earth and flattening it out onto a map.

He called the resulting animations “Skyscapes.”

To gather imagery for “Pathfinding,” Roth traveled to Scottsdale earlier this year to photograph the Arizona sky. He knew that might mean capturing only cloudless skies — a new aspect to his work. To compensate for the lack of clouds, he planned to pair the images with more complicated mapping projections, revealing smooth gradients through hidden cartographic mathematics.

For more information, visit www.SMoCA.org.