ROE ETHRIDGE

Rainbow over Shore Front Parkway, a photograph of a section of the two and a half mile stretch of beachfront road of the same name, locates the exhibition in Rockaway Beach, the neighborhood in which Ethridge now lives and works, as well as a filmic canon of storied drives and boulevards. Depicted with a certain romanticism, a rainbow is suspended in the dusky sky above the parkway’s banal apartment blocks. The beach dunes below belong to an in progress, major coastal resilience project, which echoes the Parkways own incompletion, as it was initially conceived to connect the shoreline from New York City, to the Hamptons. This spectre of failed and renewed ambition finds a natural parallel with artistic practice, as Ethridge narrativizes his own role, and identity as a photographer in the process.

Moving from the intimacy of daily life to the professional tone of studio set ups, Ethridge creates unexpected combinations of images, often leading the viewer to question the degree to which they have been altered, or predetermined. Traditional categorizations of photographs as documents, or constructions seem to fall away. Through his lens, the happenstance still life on a coffee shop table in Others Pick-up Counter Still Life, becomes a studied composition, broken down into a series of decisions - from the mishmash accumulation of objects, an ombre fabric that reads as a placed backdrop, to a sun-faded c-print of Kate Bush, carefully, and deliberately inserted into an oversized frame. These varying layers of intentionality lead Ethridge’s works to resist synthesizing into a singular story. Instead, their meanings splinter outward, building distinct rhythms among pairings or groups to examine the ways in which images generate abstract feelings like nostalgia and longing. This becomes most apparent in Ethridge’s works that appear to revel in their own artifice, like This is Not a Cigarette, a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of Surrealism’s most storied compositions. Imbued with wit and humor, a gleeful model leans back, hoisting a pvc pipe, painted to resemble a cigarette. Seen together, these strategies suggest the increasingly murky relationship contemporary images maintain to truth. After all, they’re all real to the extent in which they happened, at least in Ethridge’s world.

__Shore Front Parkway is Roe Ethridge’s eleventh exhibition with Andrew Kreps Gallery, and will be accompanied by a new catalog of the same title. Earlier this year, 10 Corso Como, Milan presented a survey exhibition of Ethridge’s work titled Happy Birthday Louise Parker, curated by Alessandro Rabottini. In 2022, Mack Books published AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC, the most comprehensive catalog of Ethridge’s work to date. His work was also featured in Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising, LACMA, Los Angeles, 2022. Additionally, he participated in The Triennial for Photography and New Media, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway, 2020. From 2016 to 2017, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati hosted the first comprehensive survey of Ethridge’s work in the United States, titled Roe Ethridge: Nearest Neighbor. Other solo exhibitions include Shelter Island at Foam, Amsterdam, 2016, and_Roe Ethridge_, curated by Anne Pontégnie, at Le Consortium in Dijon, France, 2012, which traveled to Museum Leuven in Belgium later that year. Ethridge’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Tate Modern, London, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.